Plesiosaur - Plesiosaurs in Contemporary Culture

Plesiosaurs in Contemporary Culture

Main article: Loch Ness Monster See also: Sea monster

It has been suggested that legends of sea serpents and modern sightings of supposed monsters in lakes or the sea could be explained by the plesiosaur’s survival into modern times. The great majority of these theories have been rejected by the scientific community, which considers them to be fantasy and pseudoscience. However, the discovery of real examples of living fossils, such as the coelacanth, and of gigantic, previously unknown animals from the ocean’s depths, such as the giant squid, have continued to breathe fresh life into these myths.

The body of a marine animal with a long neck and small head was found in the nets of the Japanese fishing boat Zuiyo Maru that had been fishing in waters off New Zealand in 1977, creating a wave of plesiosaur mania in Japan. A panel of eminent Japanese marine biologists inspected the remains. The panel included professors Ikuo Obata and Hiroshi Ozaki of Japan's National Science Museum and Dr. Toshio Kasuya from the University of Center for Marine Research. These scientists came to a number of different conclusions. Professor Yoshinori Imaizumi from the National Museum of Nature and Science concluded that the specimen "was not a fish, whale or any other mammal". While others concluded that it was a basking shark, although Professor Toshio Kasuya stated "if it was a shark, the spine would be shorter … and its neck is too long … I think that we can exclude the fish theory". However, analysis of samples of body tissue taken from the animal before it was thrown back into the sea was carried out by Dr. Shigeru Kimura, a biochemist at the University of Tokyo, who concluded that the tissue samples contained a protein, called elastodin, that is only found in sharks and not in the other groups that it had been suggested that the animal belonged to. This meant that it could not be a reptile or a mammal.

The Loch Ness monster is normally reported as looking like a plesiosaur, although it is also often described as a creature that looks nothing like a plesiosaur. However, there are a number of reasons why it could not be a plesiosaur. These include the fact that the water in the lake is too cold for a cold blooded animal to be able to survive easily, air-breathing animals would be easy to see whenever they appear at the surface to breathe, the lake is too small and contains insufficient food to be able to support a breeding colony and finally the lake was only formed 10,000 years ago during the last ice age, while plesiosaurs became extinct over 65 million years ago. Frequent explanations for the sightings include waves, floating objects, tricks of the light, swimming animals (such as an otter, which can reach up to 2m in length, a sturgeon, etc.), a group of swimming birds seen from afar (such as a duck with its young), and practical jokes.