If you've found your way here, it's safe to assume you have some
interest in the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster. Perhaps you are a
skeptic, perhaps you are an ardent believer. Either way, you are quite
welcome here. But be forewarned the purpose of this blog is not to
debate the existence of Nessie. That can be done at numerous other
sites around the Internet. Here we shall operate on the assumption that
centuries of sightings and reported encounters, a reasonable dash of sonar evidence, and just a very small pinch of possibly valid photographs all stewed together form a sufficient
recipe for discussing the identity, rather than the existence, of our mystery creature.
Be
forewarned some of my articles here won't be written for a general
audience, but will assume the reader already has some grounding in the
literature on the subject. The
next thing I must warn you about this blog is that apart from only a
few original observations of my own, along with some of my own sketches,
the majority of information you'll find here is not original but a
synthesis of ideas, theories, and hard work
first put forward by others (for which credit will be cited wherever
appropriate). This is after all a discussion that's gone on for
decades, and I am only one amateur follower of the mystery that
surrounds Loch Ness.
As a matter of fact, the theory that Nessie is a giant
salamander was first published in 1934 by one Lieutenant Colonel W. H.
Lane in his 18 page book The Home Of The Loch Ness Monster, a book I
was barely aware of until recently (and would dearly love to own). In
the most comprehensive analysis of the data ever undertaken, Roy P.
Mackal concluded in his landmark book The Monsters of Loch Ness
(Swallow Press, 1976) that Nessie was most likely to be an amphibian of
the suborder Embolomeri.
Other theories have dominated the debate during all these
intervening years, the most popular and often cited (at least in terms
of press coverage) being the completely untenable proposition that Plesiosaurs, an
extinct order of aquatic reptiles, could somehow still be alive, and
living in a Scottish lake nearly as inhospitable to them as the surface
of the Moon would be to us (and holding their breath the entire time). I
believe a re-evaluation of the known evidence brings us back full
circle to what Lane proposed in 1934, and shall present that idea in the
pages of this blog.
