![]() “The more plesiosaur fossils discovered in freshwater environments, the more this will further build the picture to explain why plesiosaurs might be turning up in freshwater environments around the world,” said Georgina Bunker, a student who was a co-author of the paper.ĭr. “We’ve always known this.”īut Nick Longrich, the lead author of the study, said his team had one of the stronger cases for it because they found fossils of 12 plesiosaurs, proof that it was not just one plesiosaur that wandered into freshwater and then died there. “This new study is simply providing additional evidence for certain members of this group living in freshwater,” said Dean Lomax, a paleontologist and visiting scientist at the University of Manchester. This is not the first study to find that plesiosaurs lived in freshwater. “Existence of Loch Ness Monster is ‘plausible’” read headlines in The Scotsman, The Telegraph and elsewhere, seizing on a phrase in the University of Bath’s announcement of the study’s findings. “Loch Ness Monster bombshell,” blared a headline from Britain’s Daily Express tabloid. It “gives further credit to the idea that Nessie may have been able to survive and even thrive in Loch Ness,” said an article on page 32 of the Inverness Courrier, a biweekly newspaper in the Scottish Highlands. Local papers have celebrated the finding. That could mean, they reasoned excitedly, that Nessie, who is sometimes described as looking a lot like a plesiosaur, really could live in Loch Ness, a freshwater lake. Known as plesiosaurs, these long-necked creatures that could grow up to 40 feet long were thought to have dwelled exclusively in oceans.īut a discovery published in a paper last week by researchers in Britain and Morocco added weight to a hypothesis that some Loch Ness monster enthusiasts have long clung to: that plesiosaurs lived not just in seas, but in freshwater, too. LONDON - Millions of years before the first (alleged) sighting of the Loch Ness monster, populations of giant reptiles swam through Jurassic seas in areas that are now Britain.
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