Loch Ness monster 'an elephant'

NESSIE, the Loch Ness monster, is in fact an elephant, according to a Scottish palaeontologist who claims to have solved the riddle surrounding the unexplained sightings of a monster in a lake near Glasgow in Scotland.

Neil Clark, curator of palaeontology at Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum, who has spent two years investigating the myth, said that the idea for Nessie was dreamt up as a "magnificent piece of marketing" by a circus impresario after he saw one of his elephants bathing in the loch.

In 1933, the same year as the first modern "sighting" of Nessie, Bertram Mills offered £20,000 ($47,298) - or £1 million ($2.36 million) in today's money - to anyone who could capture the monster for his circus at Olympia, based in London.

Clark, who made a name for himself by discovering a 165 million-year-old dinosaur footprint on the Isle of Skye in 2004, said that the legend of the Loch Ness monster was "largely a product of the 20th century".

He said: "Most sightings occurred after 1933 ... All we have are eyewitness accounts, fuzzy photographs, distant video footage and proven hoaxes".

Most could be explained by floating logs or waves, but there were a number of unexplained sightings of a creature elephant grey, with a long neck and humped back particularly from 1933.

"My research suggests that these were elephants belonging to circuses. Circus fairs visiting Inverness stopped on the banks of Loch Ness to allow their animals to rest", said Clark.

"When their elephants were allowed to swim in the loch, only the trunk and two humps could be seen: the first hump being the top of the head and the second being the back of the animal.

"The resulting impression would be of an animal with a long neck and two humps perhaps more if there were more than one elephant in the water.

"It is not surprising Bertram Mills offered a £20,000 reward to anyone who could capture the monster for his circus. He already had the Loch Ness monster in his circus", said Clark.

Early elephants used 'swimming trunks'

The oldest foetus: 166 days old and 6cm long

Scientists believe they have discovered why elephants have trunks - they used them as underwater snorkels.

New research suggests that the animals evolved from mammals like the sea cow which is still found in some of the world's oceans.


Ann Gaeth: " Elephants are weird animals"

The elephants' aquatic ancestry was revealed by the careful laboratory study of one embryo and six foetuses, ranging in age from 58 to 166 days old.

Ann Gaeth, at the University of Melbourne, Australia, had the rare opportunity to look at the foetuses after her colleague, Roger Short, was sent the specimens from the Kruger National Park in South Africa. The foetuses were taken from elephants killed in a culling operation in 1993.

Ancestral features

She found that all the elephant foetuses contained a physiological curiosity called a nephrostome. This is a funnel-shaped kidney duct found only in freshwater fish, frogs and egg-laying reptiles and mammals.

Elephants were once at home in the ocean

"The elephant is so unusual," Ms Gaeth told BBC News Online. "No other mammal that produces live offspring has these nephrostomes."

The nephrostomes appear very early in embryo development and then disappear. "Something that appears early in gestation is much more likely to be ancestral. Those features that appear later in development are likely to be related to more recent adaptations," says Ms Gaeth.

Ms Gaeth says that fossil evidence indicates that elephants left behind their aquatic life about 30m years ago. She has identified changes to their bodies that have occurred to adapt them to life on land.

Up periscopes

Their lungs now allow the elephants to suck up a large amount of water in their trunks and hold it there, before letting it gush into their mouths.

The youngest embryo studied was 58 days old and 4mm long

The trunks themselves appear extremely early on in foetal development, being shown in even the earliest embryo examined. This suggests that they were used when the elephants' ancestors lived in water, probably as snorkels.

Modern elephants still use their trunks in this way. When Asian elephants used for logging are required to travel from one island to another, they frequently swim.

Their necks are too short to allow them to breathe with their mouths, so the trunk is pushed up like a periscope and used as a snorkel.

Internal testicles

Further embryonic evidence that elephants once swam is that, unlike other land-living mammals, they have internal testicles and always have done. Seals and whales also have internal testicles, but only acquired them when their land-living ancestors took to the seas 60m years ago.

Fossil studies of elephant ancestry have been supplemented in recent years by DNA, biochemical and immunological evidence, all of which show that aquatic beginnings were likely. The modern elephants' nearest relatives are the sea cows - dugongs and manatees.

This latest work, backing up these suggestions, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/340286.stm

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