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Well... maybe not THE fabled Loch Ness Monster, but a famous moviemaker's vision of the mythical beast. The discovery was made as part of a survey of the lake done by Norwegian company Kongsberg Maritime and two local groups, The Loch Ness Project and VisitScotland.
This image shows outlines of the movie prop that famously sank during filming of a 1970s Sherlock Holmes thriller.
The surveyors deployed an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) called MUNIN, which pinged on a very Nessie-looking feature lying on the seafloor of Scotland's second deepest body of water. The image clearly showed the body and head of something that looked very much like our notion of 'Nessie,' based on the grainy photos and lousy video that purport to show her in the water.
Long-lost Monster
In fact, it was Nessie! Just not the real Nessie. This was a long-lost film mock-up of the monster that sank in the 1970s, while director Billy Wilder was on the lake filming "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes." The underwater robot wasn't necessarily searching for Nessie, but finding her was an added bonus for Kongsberg.
They plan to keep putting MUNIN through its paces at the loch, which is notoriously deep, and difficult to survey. So, stay tuned, maybe Nessie is still out there.
Nessie Found! Sort Of
Plesiosaurs had four large flippers, and many had remarkably long necks. They lived from about 200 million years ago to 66 million years ago, disappearing in the same mass extinction that doomed the dinosaurs. Nessie, Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster, often is portrayed as looking like a plesiosaur. The researchers conducted a series of computer simulations based on the anatomy of a plesiosaur from 180 million years ago called Meyerasaurus to find the most effective swimming strategy for this body design.
A replica of the Plesiosaur "Tuarangisaurus Cabazai" made from polyurethane foam is pictured on display at the Argentine Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires
The method that produced the fastest forward speed was flapping the two front flippers up and down in an underwater flying motion similar to penguins and sea turtles. "What was unexpected was that no matter what motion we simulated for the back flippers, they could not substantially contribute to the plesiosaur's forward motion," said Georgia Institute of Technology computer science professor Greg Turk. The back flippers were probably used to steer and provide stability, said the researchers, whose work was published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
‘Weird and unique creatures’
Plesiosaurs, which ate fish and squid, came in various shapes and sizes, some with shorter necks and others with lengthy ones. Elasmosaurus, for example, was about 46 feet (14 meters) long. Meyerasaurus, unearthed in Germany, measured 10 feet (3 meters) long. "The plesiosaurs were a highly successful group of large predatory creatures, yet we didn't know how they swam,” Turk said. “Their body plan wasn't an isolated fluke, pardon the pun, because the history of plesiosaurs stretched over 135 million years and dozens of species." Plesiosaur fossils were first described in 1824. Ever since, scientists have debated how they swam. "Plesiosaur swimming has remained a mystery for almost 200 years because it is difficult to determine how an extinct animal with a unique body plan moved," said paleontologist Adam Smith of Britain's Nottingham Natural History Museum.
There have been competing hypotheses, with some researchers suggesting plesiosaurs moved their limbs mostly backward and forward, in a rowing motion. The underwater flying method is unusual because swimming creatures, including most fish and whales, tend to generate thrust using their tails, Smith said. "Plesiosaurs are truly weird and unique creatures," he added.
Ancient 'Loch Ness Monster' Reptiles Swam Like Penguins
Millions of years ago when dinosaurs ruled the land, these early crocodiles dominated the oceans, but they never seem to have caught the public's imagination as dinosaurs have. Perhaps this will change with the discovery of a 135- million-year-old dakosaur skull and two lower jaws in the Patagonia desert of southern Argentina. The researchers who describe it in the journal Science call it Dakosaurus andiniensis, the Andean Dakosaur, to contrast it to those that swam in other parts of the world at the time. What a contrast it is. "At first glance, it was evident that Dakosaurus andiniensis was truly unique among marine crocodiles," said Diego Pol, an expert on ancient animals at the Ohio State University.
He took part in the research and says the creature was distinct from its crocodile cousins of the Jurassic era because it had a tall, short head shaped like a bullet and large, powerful, serrated teeth that seem to belong in a dinosaur's mouth. These features indicate that it was a predator capable of gobbling reptiles and other large sea life, filling a niche eventually taken over by large sharks. In contrast, other dakosaurs and their modern crocodile descendants have long, thin snouts and many thin teeth suitable for feeding on smaller, more agile prey such as fish. "We find these results extremely interesting because they indicate that the diversity of crocodiles back in the Jurassic was much greater than expected," he added.
Based on the size of the skull, Mr. Pol and his colleagues from the National University of La Plata, Argentina estimate that the creature was four meters long. They infer its body shape based on a computer program that analyzed the fossils and found that they most resemble the early crocodile branch that had flippers and a fish-like tail instead of four feet and a tail like modern crocodiles. "This analysis revealed that the anatomical changes along the evolution of the Dakosaurus lineage were clearly the most drastic evolutionary change in the history of marine crocodiles. This places the 135-million-year-old Dakosaurus andiniensis not only as one of the most recent members of this family, but also as the most bizarre marine crocodile known today," he explained.
The National Geographic Society in Washington, which sponsored the research, says dakosaurs were only one of the monsters that cavorted in the world's oceans between 250 million and 65 million years ago. Back then shallow seas and a lack of significant marine predators created new opportunities for many reptiles that had first developed on land. They included such beasts as giant ichthyosaurs that might have reached 25 meters in length and plesiosaurs with seven-meter-long necks reminiscent of the fabled Loch Ness monster in Scotland. Diego Pol says that all dakosaurs became extinct by the end of the Cretaceous era 65 million years ago, leaving us with only a fraction of the crocodile diversity of that long ago time.
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