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Scotland is a cold and -- dare I say it -- bleak place. Inverness (which is at the northern end of Loch Ness) is further north than Moscow, Russia. But the Scots are featured prominently among history's greatest inventors, and there's little they like re-inventing more than the image of Scotland itself. Which is something they have been keen on since the late 18th Century, with the specific purpose of rustling up some tourist pounds/euros/dollars/yen.

Some people would sooner be funny that factual but the fact is no one in the modern era has seriously believed there's a dinosaur in Loch Ness for the simple reason that the father of modern geology was a Scotsman named James Hutton. From employing Hutton's principles the Scots long have known that Loch Ness was formed by glacial scouring during the Last Glacial Period, which makes it tens of millions younger than the extinction of the dinosaurs.

They also know that not much lives in the loch, in large part because the water is stained by the same peat that gives their whisky its characteristic flavor, which makes the water so dark that sunlight cannot penetrate it. Which makes for too little nourishment for a breeding population of large aquatic animals to live off.

However, Loch Ness is connected to the sea at both ends by man-made canals, which presents the possibility that there could be salt-water animals that can tolerate fresh water that visit it from time to time. Bull sharks, for instance, have been caught as far north in the Mississippi river as St Louis. And the fresh water Lago de Nicaragua, which is land-locked, has had bull sharks in it for all its recorded history (dating back to the 17th Century).

So the serious speculation runs along the lines of the giant sea otter or sturgeon, or other large fish that is adaptable to both fresh and sea water. Or it's some as-yet unidentified species. The coelacanth, the megamouth shark and the Guadalupe fur seal all were believed extinct, until they weren't. Which goes to the fact that there still is much to be learned about what lives in the planet's seas.

As for the serious Nessie researchers, the famous/infamous "Surgeon's Photograph" was always a thorn in their side because neither the plesiosaur nor any of the other potential (realistic) candidates have a neck that will articulate in such a fashion. And they also always had known it must be fraudulent because the full frame of the photograph was rarely every published. And the reason for that is simple. The object in the cropped photo might look large, but ...

(click to embiggen)

... when you see the uncropped image, it's clear from the size of the ripples around it that it is really quite small. There is no frothing or whitecapping, so this obviously was just a normal windy day on the loch, but if that head is standing 10 feet out of the water, then those waves should be big enough to surf on.

Many years ago I had an enlightening conversation with a man who was what I would call a "serious" Nessie researcher, who also happened to be a life-long resident of Inverness. It was he first showed me the full frame image of the Surgeon's photo. This was years before Chris Spurling's deathbed confession but he agreed the photo obviously was faked.

He also had the full set of photos from the Zuiyo-Maru incident, when a Japanese fishing trawler that pulled up a rotting carcass that bore passing resemblance to what the plesiosaur is reckoned to have looked like. The only photo from the set that had been published was this one:

From the other photos it was obvious that they had chosen the one deliberately deceptive image from the lot of them for publication because from the rest of them it didn't look like anything except a large, rotting ... something.

Taking all into consideration, the principal photo looks to be a rotted basking shark, which are notorious for taking on all manner of disguises as they decay, and what appears to be a long, serpentine neck is more likely nothing more than the fish's jawbone, having come unhinged at the one end.

My last question to this gentleman was whether he believed there was something in the loch, and if so, what he thought it was. His reply was basically that he was agnostic as to what it was. Except it couldn't be a dinosaur, plesiosaur or otherwise. But he said he personally knew and had spoken with dozens of people, many he'd known his entire life, who claimed to have seen it. Clergy, police, academicians, physicians, people of repute who had nothing to gain by going public, and most received nothing except ridicule. He said he didn't believe they all of them could be lying, nor seeing things that weren't there.