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Hugh Gray was the author of the first photograph of the future Loch Ness Monster
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- Author: Neil J. Gostling*
- Role, The Conversation
1 hour ago
Hugh Gray was taking his usual walk after church around Loch Ness in Scotland on a Sunday in November 1933.
But he stopped his walk when he saw something floating in the water less than a meter away from him.
Gray quickly took several photos of what he described to Scotland’s Daily Record as “an object of considerable proportions.”
A few months earlier, in April 1933, local hotel owner Aldie Mackay and her husband had described a whalelike animal to the Inverness Courier newspaper. And in the Scottish summer of 1933, a man named George Spicer claimed that he had observed “the nearest shape to a dragon or prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life.”
He described a creature two to three meters long that carried “a ram or some other animal” for dinner.
The animal has been a popular legend since the first sightings recorded in the second half of the 6th century. But when Gray captured this floating, tailed animallike mass, the image was considered the first photographic evidence of the existence of “Nessy” the Loch Ness Monster and sparked a kind of enthusiasm for the monster.
90 years have passed since this photo and the obsession with finding the Loch Ness Monster remains.
As a paleobiologist, I want to clarify whether what we think is Nessy can really exist and whether we should continue searching for the monster.
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Photo of something in the lake in 1933
Sophisticated farce?
There are many fish in Loch Ness, indicating an abundance of food.
The space is also large. The lake is huge, with 7.4 million cubic meters of water and a depth of 227 meters.
The water in Loch Ness accounts for half the fresh water of all the lakes in England and Wales. In other words, there’s plenty of water to hide in.
Our idea of what the Loch Ness Monster looked like is based on an iconic photo taken a year after Gray’s image. It shows a long neck stretching over the black waters of the lake.
This gave rise to the idea that the Loch Ness Monster was a living relic from the age of dinosaurs, struggling for a solitary existence in the depths of the lake.
It turns out that the picture is not what it claims to be. Decades later it turned out that it was an elaborate hoax.
The famous photo, taken a year after the first image, shaped the popular perception of what the Loch Ness Monster looked like. Today it is known that the photo was fake.
However, there is evidence that there are threemeterlong monsters that are quite similar to the Loch Ness Monster. These reptiles are called plesiosaurs, but disappeared in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.
Finds of plesiosaur fossils suggest that they may have lived in freshwater. The fossils include threemeterlong bones and teeth from an adult and a 1.5meterlong arm bone from a baby plesiosaur.
But the Loch Ness monster might not be a plesiosaur.
Unfortunately, the truth lies in biology. While there may be enough food and space in the lake, there are no other living Loch Ness monsters that could create a viable animal population and enable Nessy’s existence.
Why are we looking for Nessy and other monsters?
In August 2023, Inverness (the Scottish city closest to Loch Ness) was visited by several monster hunters. They swept across the lake with drones equipped with hydrophones and boats emitting sonar signals all in the hope of proving Nessy’s existence.
They found nothing, which is a strong indication that Loch Ness remains free of monsters.
The monster hunting craze isn’t just limited to Loch Ness. There is another mythical aquatic animal called Mokelembembe, which is said to live in the Congo River basin in Africa. He looks like a dinosaur. Like Nessy, I doubt he exists.
But I’m not a total party person. I think people should continue their search for seemingly extinct creatures.
The Tasmanian wolf, for example. The last of this species was believed to have died in captivity in the 1930s.
However, recent research has concluded that the Tasmanian wolf may have become extinct much later than previously thought. It may have lasted until the 2000s.
And in fact, researchers suggest that small groups of Tasmanian wolves may have survived.
Live coelacanth found in 2019 near Pumula on the coast of South Africa’s KwaZuluNatal province.
Sometimes animals we thought were extinct return to the modern world. The most famous example is perhaps the coelacanth.
This fish has a very long fossil record, ranging from the Devonian to the end of the Cretaceous period. Then he disappeared.
It was thought to have been lost in the same event that destroyed the dinosaurs and plesiosaurs. To date, no coelacanth fossils have been found in Paleogene sediments.
But in 1938, ichthyologist (marine biologist who studies various species of fish) Marjorie CourtneyLatimer (19072004) found a single specimen that had been caught by fishermen at a market in South Africa.
His discovery sparked a 20year search for the species’ population (be sure to read the excellent book A Fish Caught in Time on the subject). And now we know of two species of coelacanths in populations living near Indonesia and southern Africa.
Moral of the story: Don’t let anything stop you from going in search of thrills, not even monsters. You might make a fantastic discovery.
* Neil J. Gostling is Professor of Evolution and Palaeobiology at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.
This article was originally published on the academic news website The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original English version here.