27-07-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Legend of the Loch Ness monster: the story of the mythological ‘Nessie'
Mythological creatures fascinate us; they are intriguing, magical and sometimes frightening. Yet they all have one thing in common: they are not real. One example is the legend of the Loch Ness monster.
The Loch Ness legend
Loch Ness is a freshwater lake located in northern Scotland in the United Kingdom. 'Loch' is pronounced 'lock'. The word means 'lake' in the Scottish language.
Loch Ness is quite large – roughly 37 kilometres long, 1,600 metres wide and up to 240 metres deep. Legends about the lake date back nearly 1,500 years.
In modern times, more than 1,000 people claim they've seen 'Nessie', the name locals gave the creature. Some say she resembles a salamander, while others claim she resembles a whale or a seal.
Nessie is not a plesiosaur
Over the years, some people have conjured up fake evidence, such as footprints, photographs or phoney floating objects, to trick others and 'prove' Nessie's existence.
The best-known of these is a 1934 photograph of what appears to be a creature with a long neck and small head.
The image looks like a plesiosaur, a long-extinct marine dinosaur that resembles descriptions of Nessie.
The phoney photograph was really a moulded figure of a plesiosaur floating on top of a toy submarine.
Yet many people believed – and still believe – the photo is real.
Why Nessie is not real
There are a few reasons why we know the Loch Ness monster is an imaginary creature.
First, a large air-breathing animal would have to surface frequently. That means many more people would have seen Nessie over the years.
Second, many people have searched for Nessie, all without success. A 2019 study of DNA samples collected from the lake did not suggest the presence of a dinosaur or large reptile.
Third, the Loch Ness body of water has existed for only 10,000 years. But the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. So, a prehistoric dinosaur could not have ever lived in the lake.
Finally, for the Loch Ness monster to exist and persist through time, a population of these animals must reproduce. Single animals live only for their lifetimes and not for hundreds of years, as the legend suggests.
This article was first published in The Conversation. It was written by Michael A. Little, a distinguished professor emeritus of anthropology at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
