Nessie, Plesiosaurs and Creationism

It seems Nessie has been brought into the creationism/evolution controversy and the usual invectives that get hurled about ... are getting hurled about. The original story is here but the point is that the creationist teachers presuppose Nessie to be a plesiosaur which is seen as a proof against evolution. I suppose the argument is valid to some degree, plesiosaurs died out about 65 million years ago and if they are found today that would mean dating techniques based on these "key" fossils would be weakened.

But I am not sure that holds since the good old coelacanth was found to be alive and not extinct in 1938 but I do not read of that upsetting paleontologists' dating of rocks/fossils (and I presume most zoologists would be delighted to find a live plesiosaur still swimming around today's oceans). What the creationist Christians need to find is not a live plesiosaur but a fossilised plesiosaur with a fossilised human in or near it. That would upset the scientific apple cart no end, but to date no such thing has been found .

The other problem regarding this theory is that Nessie is not a plesiosaur - or certainly does not act like one. The alleged body shape is similar but that is just about where the similarities end. I would take the personal view that she is not a plesiosaur, sturgeon, catfish or giant eel but something akin to a fish-like amphibian or an amphibian-like fish. It was discussed somewhere else that perhaps Nessie is a highly adapted plesiosaur which does exhibit Nessie-like behaviour, in which case the animal is probably as different from the original as a lemur is from a human and hence irrelevant to this current topic.

Whatever the creature turns out to be, I do not think it will have any bearing on the creation-evolution debate.

Of Monsters and Exhibitions

A while back I wrote briefly on the "denessiefication" of one of the Loch Ness exhibition centres as a more sceptical line of inquiry emerged and the centre also moved towards a more holistic approach to telling the story of Loch Ness (as the two brochures separated by 30 years shows below).

 

I was rummaging through some old stuff recently and found some more material which merited this article. To give you some background, entrepreneurs have always sought to cash in on the Nessie story since the story broke big time in 1933. Popular Nessie style postcards soon appeared, special bus services were laid on and adverts with strange looking Nessies endorsed products (well, nobody owned the image rights to the Loch Ness Monster). However, the genre of "Exhibition" as a business in its own right did not properly appear until the second wave of Nessie mania in the 1970s (the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau from the 1960s also ran a small visitors centre at its HQ though I do not recall if it was pay to view or voluntary donations).

At that time there were three of four exhibitions on the go competing for the the new surge in the tourist pound. In the village of Drumnadrochit by Urquhart Bay was the "Original Loch Ness Monster Exhibition" and the "Official Loch Ness Monster Exhibition". I don't know why one though it was "original" and the other thought it was "official". They recently came to an agreement on names and these days they are the "Nessieland Castle Monster Centre" and "The Loch Ness Centre".

There was also the "Great Glen Exhibition" in Fort Augustus which had a Nessie section but I am not sure if it survived into the 1980s. And then there was Frank Searle's exhibition of which more at the end.

Amongst my old Rip Hepple nessletters I came upon this flyer for the "Official Loch Ness Monster Exhibition Centre" from the early 1980s.You can click on the images to enlarge and read the text but it is pretty clear it was a "believer" oriented place at that time (like all the others).

 

The other "monstrous" sight you would see at Loch Ness was that of an Englishman wearing a kilt. I am only kidding, Tony. The man exposing his knees to the world is Tony Harmsworth, the designer and curator of the "official" exhibition. He now distances himself from that exhibition since he became a Nessie Atheist and at best believes Nessie was/is a sturgeon (a theory itself not easy to prove). Though he still runs a tour bus and tells the tourists his own tales of Loch Ness.

So I found some photographs I had taken of various exhibitions in the early 1980s but to my chagrin I did not write on the back their location. So I am not entirely sure 30 years on what exhibition is which. I think the first three are from the "Original" exhibition but feel free to put me right on that. The first is a model of the ubiquitous plesiosaur genre. It is not surprising this theory held sway with exhibitors, the idea of an antediluvian dinosaur ploughing the depths of Loch Ness was more likely to bring them in than a giant worm or eel!

 

Another plesiosaur-type exhibit, this time a painting executed by the late William Owen who was involved with the "Great Glen Exhibition" though I think this painting may have moved elsewhere by then.

 

Topical to see a Nessie on land painting as I currently work my way through a series of articles on land sightings! The artist looks like he/she is called "McCutcheon" but that is as much as I know. Perhaps someone could add a comment about this artist and any other similar work?

 

This darkened exhibit below I am sure is from the "Official" exhibition as I recall it being a dimly lit affair but I could be wrong. It describes the "two-body" underwater picture taken by Robert Rines and his team and the narration proclaims how the sonar which went off at the time predicted there should be two objects in the area of the strobe shot. That sounds like an article in its own right!

But for sheer class, individualism and no expense spared we have Frank Searle's own exhibition on the other side of the loch on the shores of Foyers. Now I am sure there are plenty of photographs of this little exhibition tucked away in tourist albums but I have to date seen no pictures on the Internet, so here for the first(?) time is a look inside Frank's display.

 

As you can see it was a rather humble affair in terms of appearance but not in terms of ego as Frank very much publicised himself as well as the monster. He used an old caravan in which he erected these panels. The photographs and newspaper clippings were covered over by some protective polythene and he added his own comments in the small white pieces of paper you see.

The panel to the left consists of his photographs while the panel facing us consists of newspaper clippings. The headlines are bit too far to make out but the main photo on the clippings is certainly a scene from "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" when the "monster" attacks their boat. The other head and neck picture above that is interesting but it is probably a drawing rather than a photograph.

Unlike the other exhibitions, Frank did not charge admission, which is hardly surprising considering the minimal investment that went into it. I think I do recall a donations box being visible somewhere. Shortly after this, Frank Searle left Loch Ness. His exhibition was "decommissioned" by persons unknown who tipped the entire caravan into the loch.

Today, the two main exhibitions continue at Loch Ness.The Loch Ness Centre certainly appears to be doing well with 300,000 vistors in one year recently. At £5 a person, that's £1.5 million ($2.3 million) and that doesn't include the gift shop and other merchandise. Just imagine the income when the monster's existence is finally proven!

Another Monster on Loch Ness

From the Scotsman newspaper (link):

THE Jacobite Warrior, Scotland’s largest loch-based cruise ship, was launched today on Loch Ness. 

• Largest loch-based cruise ship in Scotland

• Capacity to carry up to 1500 passengers each day

• Ship designed to capitalise on increase numbers of tourists from China, Brazil and Russia

I feel a bit sorry for these tourists. They will arrive at the loch with Nessie expectations, only to have them dashed by the local experts! Would they have turned up if they had been told these theories beforehand? Well, perhaps I presume too much of the Jacobite tour guides?

Nessie On Land

This post contains links to our series on land sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. The concept itself is summarised in the Overview article below. Articles will be added as and when completed.

Overview - a general look at these most mysterious of sightings.

Making an Impression - searching for tracks, depressions and other evidence.

The Harvey and MacDonald Case - A little known sighting from 1934.

The Margaret Munro Case - A famous case! And also at this link. 

The Spicers Case - link.

Morphology Of The Monster - What do land sightings tell us about Nessie morphology and behaviour?


Predator - Does Nessie hunt on land?

The Curious Case of Lieutenant Colonel Fordyce - Perhaps the most unusual case of all.

The Monk who saw the Monster - A previously unknown tale from the Abbey.

The Cameron-MacGruer Case - Did Nessie terrorise a bunch of kids?

Heart Attack Monster - Allegedly.

A Rediscovered Land Sighting - From 1925 before the Nessie Era.

For other classic land sightings consult the Classic Sightings section for the Spicers and Alex Muir cases.

Olympic Torch to cross Loch Ness

It's a busy weekend at Loch Ness, on top of the annual RockNess music festival which is guaranteed to keep our noise sensitive Nessie firmly underwater, a possibly unique event will come to pass as the Olympic Torch traverses the Great Glen (map from bbc.co.uk below).

As some may know, the torch has been going up Britain carried by the great and the good, the famous and not so famous people of these isles. The torch is scheduled to arrive at the southern end of Loch Ness just after 4pm and then proceed up the A82 and then cross the loch to the music festival.

A good time for Nessie to surface with all those professional newscaster cameras around, but I wouldn't hold out too much hope! More details here.

POSTSCRIPT: Looks like the old "Loch Ness Hoodoo" of stuck cameras afflicted the BBC as their live webfeed of the road journey disappeared somewhere north of Invermoriston and did not come back till they were beyond Loch Ness and heading into Inverness!

Some Trap Camera Pictures from Loch Ness

Having had the trail cameras out and about at various times and locations, I thought I would put up a gallery of some of the more interesting images. Note if the Loch Ness Monster is in any of them, I can't see it! You can click on each image for more detail.

First we have a pleasant day at Loch Ness with some people out on a fishing excursion.

However, Highland weather can be quite temperamental as this next shot shows. Not quite great Nessie spotting weather.

The next picture is one I was hoping wouldn't happen but then again, I am half glad it did. Someone had found my trail camera but clearly they left it else I would not be showing you these pictures! So I thank the person for their honesty but clearly I will have to find a more covert location. I though it was well embedded and out of the way from tourists but then again, those boats I just showed could possibly notice it from afar and come back later to investigate.

As is usual the loch stirs itself and begins to attack the shoreline.

The sky begins to darken and the loch becomes more unsettled and harder to interpret. Is that a long hump at the centre left or just a wave?

The next camera I put on the roadside for one night just to see what happened as darkness descended. As it turned out a UFO (Unidentified Furry Object) came into view at midnight. I must admit I have no idea what it is. Perhaps a fox or rabbit? Too small and furry for Nessie, that's for sure.

 I then moved the camera to a spot just north of Fort Augustus.

Things got interesting when this critter turned up at 10:36pm.

"What was that little red light I just saw?"

"I think I better investigate this ...."

"... and give it a good sniff."

I was wondering what this "UFO" was. A ferret, polecat, weasel? Actually, I think it might have been a Pine Marten which is itself not a common creature. It seems our Loch Ness animals are pretty aware of these devices, which I don't mind so long as they don't sit in front of them all night!

More pictures as and when interesting things pass in front of them!

Nessie on Land: Making an Impression

Moving on from our overview of Loch Ness Monster Land Sightings, we have an aspect of these cases which turns up now and again and is best exemplified by the one case ascribed to the late monster hunter, Ted Holiday in 1962.  We take up the story in his own words from his book, "The Great Orm of Loch Ness" (p.11 1st Ed).

Passing the stony beach I moved on to prospect the wooded shore beyond Inverfarigaig which is hard to reach and seldom visited. A black fir-wood led down to a tract of bracken which ended in a beach. It was narrow, steeply-angled and overgrown with saplings. I examined this beach for some distance in both directions but the only organic object discovered was the drowned carcass of a wildcat. However, at one spot there was a curious patch of bent and broken bushes several yards wide beside the water for which it was hard to think of an obvious explanation. Years later, I learned that local people do occasionally find these patches and they associate them with the Orm.

The "Orm" was Holiday's own name for Nessie. The maps below shows the houses of Inverfarigaig and the circle is where I think Ted Holiday's beach was (I take "beyond Inverfarigaig" to mean west towards the shore and not south on the road). Though it may not be the only candidate it certainly is out of the way of the main road and looks hard to get to. Some may think the locals were pulling Ted's leg but whatever you think of this story, it stands to reason that if the Loch Ness Monster takes to land then it is going to leave evidence of its journey.

Therein lies an opportunity for research, albeit a very rare one. But what is the opportunity and how does one know they are looking at it? Several of our cases mention forensic evidence of the creature's fleeting appearance on land. The Margaret Munro case mentions a large depression being found on the beach by her employers when they went to investigate her claims. The E.H. Bright case mentions a three toed foot impression being left by the creature and the Alastair Erskine-Murray case involves a large depression the size of a "bull walrus". Meanwhile, the story of Alec Muir has our witnesses following a trail through the undergrowth to a a bubbling loch surface. We also have the case from the 1970s involving teenagers camping and hearing strange noises outside their tent at night which revealed crushed vegetation around them in the morning.

After Arthur Grant's famous encounter in January 1934, H.F. Hay (a fellow of the Zoological Society of Scotland) visited the spot with Grant and claimed to have seen evidence of body and appendage marks on the beach. The Grant case had the misfortune to have the yet to be discredited "hunter" Marmaduke Wetherell getting involved. There is a photograph of him and Arthur Grant examining wool or something similar attached to bushes. On the subject of tracks, Wetherell is associated with the infamous "Nessie footprints" found on a beach between Foyers and Fort Augustus in December 1933 (picture below). The footprints were declared by him to be genuine but the Natural History Museum examined a plaster cast and decided it to be the right foot of a hippopotamus! Wetherell and the Daily Mail investigation folded shortly after and Wetherell apparently vowed revenge (which seemed to imply the Mail was in on the act but had made Wetherell take the bullet alone). Years later in the Surgeon's Photo expose by Alastair Boyd and David Martin, it turned out that Wetherell had owned a silver hippo foot cast made into an ashtray.

So much for fake tracks but what about the genuine articles? There are three ways the Loch Ness Monster could leave evidence of its terrestrial lumberings, the first are ground depressions left by its body, the second is fecal material (i.e. droppings) and the third is organic material. We will look at each in turn.

DEPRESSIONS

Depressions can be any marks in the ground left by the creature. The problem is what do they look like and how rare are they? Primarily we are looking for main body marks and secondarily appendages due to their lighter and smaller impressions. In that light, we are looking for either oval, concave impressions and possibly gully like impressions for more serpentine morphology. The "canvas" of such impressions is important and indeed we should regard such depressions as rare given the shoreline features of Loch Ness. We can class the types of potential ground as:

• Heavy and light shingle
• Sand
• Grass
• Bracken type undergrowth

As far as my investigations went, the typical shoreline will consist of some feet of shingle or sand beach followed by level or slightly rising grass or undergrowth which is itself terminated by road or rockface. In fact, because of the roads, the combined  beach-vegetation strip may not be very wide at all and may only be a few feet across. The problems with depressions left by large creatures weighing one tonne or more becomes apparent on closer examination. With grass and heavier undergrowth, there is a time limit on depressions as the vegetation's resilience will spring back to close the gap. In other words, after days or even hours, one may not be aware that anything huge passed that way. The only exception is undergrowth snapped and killed by the sheer weight. Note that the type of undergrowth we are talking about would perhaps be less than two feet high, a large creature with a low centre of gravity and limbs designed primarily for moving underwater is not going to be a great negotiator of typical Loch Ness shoreline.

The problem with shingle is that heavier shingle will not be sufficiently moved to produce anything noticeable. Referring to the Margaret Munro case, her employers noticed the depression in the ground after hearing her story but if she had said nothing and they went for a walk on the beach later, would they have noticed the depression and attached any significance to it? Lighter shingle (i.e. stones less than a few centimetres) and sand offer the best hope of an out of the ordinary depression which would have a long time limit to it (until it is broken up by waves, humans, animals). As it turns out such beaches are not common at Loch Ness but this at least helps focus ones attention on where to look. Sand beaches are the least common compared to shingle but would offer the best hope of tracks being left which have some detail to them. Clearly, the bigger the stones get, the more detail is lost.

By way of example, I came across some curious marks on the shingle beach at a spot on the south side of the loch recently. The photographs below shows a kind of 20 foot long arrow head shaped arrangement of shallow trenches converging at a bush. A comparison photo of the beach further down is shown last.

Now I would normally just say that wave action was depositing lighter shingle on top of heavier but I would then expect all lines to be parallel, so to my uninformed mind, something else was at play to produce these marks. It was also unclear to me how far the water could forcefully progress up the beach as the loch level rises with rainfall and stormy weather. Now I am not saying that this was produced by a serpentine like creature writhing on the beach, I am rather saying that coming across depressions on the beach needs some thought applied to it rather than jumping to conclusions. An examination of the depressions did not reveal any further clues but it would be interesting to visit the marks in a few months time to see if they have been eroded away by natural and artificial means (I saw a group of canoeists dragging their canoes onto shore at that time though I felt the marks were not made by lightweight canoes).

FECAL MATERIAL

Moving onto fecal material, it is clear that if Nessie eats then Nessie defecates. As with Bigfoot hunters, finding such material could prove to be decisive in the Loch Ness Monster hunt as DNA material from intestinal cells could be obtained, but what exactly does one look for (or smell for)? What do Nessie faeces look like? Does she even do her "business" on land? Pertinent questions I am sure have raced through your mind many a time! One would normally give a dung heap a body swerve, but a Nessie one? It's worth its weight in gold!

Assuming faeces do end up on land, they will be even rarer than the actual land excursions themselves. But unlike the creature, they do not go back in the water. If the dung is slurry like (as it is with animals such as sharks in the clip below), then it will be absorbed into the ground and the thin layer of solids will eventually be washed away by some typical Scottish rain or dry and flake off.  Nevertheless, if people actually look for these things, there may be a chance of finding one.





 If it is more solid, the chances of discovery heighten. In fact, one would have presumed a large pile of solid Nessie faeces would have been pretty noticeable after 79 years unless people are mistaking them for livestock dung! My bet is that Nessie faeces are more slurry than solid (and I managed to type that while eating my lunch).

ORGANIC MATERIAL

But the prized item above all is a piece of the Loch Ness Monster. By that we would mean a piece of skin, tooth or claw being found in or near our depression site. Finding these small items in any other context would be next to impossible in my opinion. Indeed, it seems quite unlikely that a piece of tooth or claw would find its way onto the shore - animals tend not to shed teeth and claws as they are important to survival. But skin is a different matter, some animals shed their skin at regular intervals as they outgrow them. This moulting process occurs with snakes, lizards, salamanders and frogs. The skin can either come off in one piece or fragments. 

Whether the Loch Ness Monster sheds its skin as it grows is unknown. What is clear is that a lot of moulting animals eat their shed skin for nutrition so the evidence may be eaten as soon as it is produced! However, as such a creature drags itself along the rough shingle ground, it is possible that some skin would come off and be left behind. These may be quite small and may even be scales, again a thorough search of the suspected depression area (including under shingle) would be required.

THE STATISTICS OF THE SEARCH

Looking for depressions, faeces and skin fragments - the theory is simple enough but the practise may not be. There is approximately 85,000 metres of shoreline along Loch Ness. The beach and vegetation may extend out 2m to 10m and more from water to road or rock. Using an average of 6m gives us an initial surface coverage of about half a million square metres. That is about equivalent to the area of 100 American football fields and very inaccessible in parts. Some parts are very difficult to access such as beyond Foyers to Fort Augustus and Urquhart Bay northwards due to no road access or sheer height. These stretches alone take out a third of the available shoreline so we have more like 57,000 metres.

However, thousands of tourists access the shoreline every year (albeit for very short periods of time and not to look for faeces and skin). What are the chances of something being found? If one creature takes to the available shoreline (340,000 sq m) every month at random at night then one depression of say 6 sq m is made. Assume also the depression erodes away within that month. Now one trained and dedicated person actively searching this shoreline full time for one month would find the depression (assuming the creature does not land on the beach he has just surveyed!). However, such a person does not exist and so we are down to a mix of tourists, locals and monster hunters.

Take Steve Feltham as an example. He is a dedicated monster hunter who lives on the beach at Dores. Assume he surveys 200m of his shoreline every morning for a month. The odds of our creature landing on his stretch in any given month is about 285 to 1 against (57000 / 200). In other words, it would take 285 months to happen or 24 years. Steve has only been there 20 years so perhaps his time has not yet come!

Now take 10,000 tourists over one month parking their cars randomly along the loch and going down to the shore to spend a few minutes taking pictures. Their survey area is much shorter as their focus is on the loch ahead of them but let us assume 5m either side of them (i.e. 10m). However, their coverage is greater than our lone person due to their dispersal around the loch but in practise they tend to focus on key areas such as the location of parking laybys. So their coverage is not 10,000 * 10m but something less than that, I would say less than 5% given how far apart laybys are. That gives them a maximum coverage of 5,000m which suggests the odds of a Nessie depression being near a tourist is no better than 11 to 1 against. That suggests it would take at least a year for a tourist to be within eye shot of a Nessie landing spot. Thereafter other factors dictate:

• the individual's powers of observation to notice the depression as being noteworthy
• the quality of the depression given the sand/shingle/bracken factor
• the odds that the tourist will realise the depression has Nessie significance
• the odds that this event will get reported and be investigated

Of course, one can play around with the numbers and come to some other conclusion, but I hope I have put across the idea that it is not a given that something will be easily discovered or even make it into the public domain.

CONCLUSIONS

During the heady days of Loch Ness Monster expeditions in the 1960s and 1970s, I think it is fair to say that searching for land markings and other traces was not high up on the agenda. In fact, I am not even sure it featured at all. Given that those water based searches did not produce the final evidence, what have we got to lose by moving the search onto the shore?

Admittedly, the resources required to do this are large and so I do not expect any large scale effort in these more sceptical times. Indeed, even finding a "plesiosaur-shaped" depression may just elicit explanations that range from natural formations to someone digging it out. The marks I found myself could almost be a test case in that regard, natural, human, what? Going back to Ted Holiday's crushed bracken, we can never be quite sure when it comes to these slightly less than obvious intrusions on the loch shoreline. The prize may ultimately lie in what is found in the immediate vicinity.

However, I hope I have added a useful task to the list of those dedicated and occasional Loch Ness Monster hunters who still make their way to the loch looking for that decisive piece of evidence.