Lockness
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US Midwest- Chicago, Great Lakes)Transcript
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It has been almost a century since the first blurry photograph of the elusive Scottish monster was brought to light Hugh Gray was taking his usual post church walk around Loch Ness in Scotland on a November Sunday. In 1933 his amble was disrupted when he saw something bobbing above the water two or 3 ft from him. He quickly snapped several pictures of what he described to the Scottish Daily Record as an object of considerable dimensions. A few months earlier in April 1933 local hoteliers, Aldi Mackay and her husband had described a whale like beast to the Inverness Courier. Then in the summer of 1933 man called George Spicer stated I saw the nearest approach to a dragon or prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life. He described a creature between two and 3 m long, carrying a lamb or an animal of some kind for its supper. Since the first sightings recorded in the latter half of the sixth century, the beast was considered a folk tale. However, when Gray captured the bobbing mass with an animal like tail, it was considered the first photographic proof of Nessie and inspired a sort of monster mania. It's 90 years since this picture and the beginning of the obsession with finding the Loch Ness monster as a paleobiologist, I want to explore whether the type of monster we believe Nessie to be could exist. And if we should continue looking an elaborate hoax, there are a lot of fish in the lock, so there is enough food. There is also lots of space loch ness is huge with a volume of 7.4 billion cubic meters and a depth of 227 m. There is a lot of water to hide in which accounts for more than all the fresh water in all of the lakes of England. And Wales our idea of what the Loch Ness monster looks like is founded on an iconic picture taken a year after Gray's. This image showed a long neck stretching from the Black Waters. It is the source of the idea that the Loch Ness monster is a living relic from the time of the dinosaurs eking out a lonely existence in the depths. However, this image was not what it claimed to be and was found decades later to have been an elaborate hoax. But there is evidence to support the existence of 3 m long beasties that looked a bit like the loch monster. These reptiles are known as plesiosaurs and they were wiped out in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period discoveries of plesiosaur fossils suggest they may have lived in fresh water. The fossils included bones and teeth from 3 m long adults and an arm bone from a 1.5 m long baby. However, it's unlikely that the loch ness monster is a Pleso. Unfortunately, the truth comes down to biology. There might be enough food and enough space in the lock. But what there is not enough of is other living loch ness like monsters to make a viable population of animals to support Nessie's existence. So why look for Nessie or other monsters in August this year, Inverness played host to monster hunters scouts, the lock with drones equipped with hydrophones and boats pinging sonar all in the hope of proving the existence of Nessie. They didn't find anything which strongly suggests that loch Ness remains monster free. Monster hunting mania is not reserved to the Loch Ness monster alone. The mogul Mbembe is another a mythical water dwelling beast that supposedly lives in the Congo River basin and looks like a dinosaur like Nessie. I doubt it exists, but I'm not a total party pooper and I think people should continue their searches for seemingly extinct creatures. Take the Thylacine or Tasmanian wolf, for example, the last Tasmanian wolf, for example, was believed to have died in captivity in the 19 thirties. However, recent research found that it's possible the Tasmanian wolf went extinct much later than first thought and maybe hung on until the two thousands. In fact, researchers report that small groups of thylacines may have survived and sometimes animals we thought were extinct did come back to the modern world. The koala kant is perhaps the most famous example. This fish has a very long fossil record from the Devonian period through to the end of the Cretaceous period. Then they were gone lost in the same event that destroyed the dinosaurs and plesiosaurs, not one fossil coal aan has been described from paleogene period sediments to today. But in 1930 a single specimen caught by fishermen was found in a South African market by ichthyologist, a marine biologist who studies different fish species. Marjorie Courtenay Latimer, there followed a hunt for the next 20 years to find the population, do read the excellent of fish caught in time and we now know of two lati myriad koala cans in populations around Indonesia and southern Africa. The take home message of this. Don't let anything put you off looking for excitement or even monsters. You might just find something amazing.