Well, there’s one mystery to check off. We don’t know what happened to Amelia Earhart, the true identity of Jack the Ripper or why they made Capri Sun pouches so hard to stick a straw into. But we do know that the Loch Ness Monster’s existence, though not exactly proven, was at least plausible.
That’s according to to a group of scientists from the University of Bath, the University of Portsmouth in the UK and Université Hassan II. They’ve come across the fossilized remains of a plesiosaur out in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Morocco, at the bottom of what used to be a riverbed.
What does that have to do with Nessie up in Scotland? Quite a bit, actually. See, a running theory for what exactly Scottish locals may have witnessed in Loch Ness is that it was some sort of dinosaur — likely a plesiosaur — that managed to hang on past the brink of extinction. That is, of course, assuming Scots weren’t just seeing a floating tree branch or something.
But the wrinkle in that theory is that the marine dinosaurs we know of that fit Nessie’s description were all saltwater creatures. However, the new discovery suggests that plesiosaurs could not only tolerate freshwater but may well have lived there, feeding on frogs on turtles. It’s possible they were something like river dolphins — relatives of the ocean-dwelling dolphins we know of today that inhabit fresh water.
So, does that mean there is — or at least was — some sort of monster in Loch Ness after all? Scientists aren’t going that far, especially since they are dating these fossils back some 66 million years ago. But if we can speculate that a small family of them may have survived in Loch Ness, protected by its isolation, long after the rest of their species died out — then it’s at least possible.
