THERE'S LITTLE DOUBT SOME AQUATIC ANIMALS, CURRENTLY UNRECOGNIZED BY SCIENCE, DO ACTUALLY EXIST
For much of human history, sailing into the blue yonder was seen by many as a death sentence. Even if your vessel
didn’t topple off the edge of the ocean, then you’d be consumed by enormous and grotesque beasties lurking at the edge of the known world. It was a fear that spanned all cultures and ages where man lived by the open water. While science can never hope to keep pace with our imagination’s ability to conjure up new and improved legends of the deep, some so-called monsters have been proven to be real – the anglerfi sh and Colossal Squid are but two examples. But any discussion of sea serpents and lake monsters surely begins with that most famous of aquatic cryptids, The Loch Ness Monster. At home in one of the world’s deepest, darkest lakes, Scotland’s national monster has been ‘spot ed’ hundreds of times. Though Loch Ness is fi lled with glacially cold water that isn’t inviting to many swimmers, a few have crossed its forbidding 22-mile expanse. One such swimmer, Mike Cross, 28, of Woodford Green, Essex,
swam the length of Loch Ness in August 2008 in 12 hours. He says: “It’s eerie. The water is so deep, it’s like peering into the abyss. But you do see shadows and these phantom shapes, observed by a fatigued swimmer, can start to look like something else.” Loch Ness is the site of perhaps the most notorious fake photograph. The misty black-and-white silhouet e of the reptilian head rising above the still water led many to believe this was some kind of long-extinct marine reptile. This myth was perpetuated for decades by endless bogus sightings. But the question remains: could a few species of dinosaur have survived in the unexplored depths? It has happened before: a Coelacanth – a species of prehistoric fi sh thought to have been extinct for some 70 million years – was discovered off the coast of South Africa in 1938. Since then, several more have turned up, showing that our understanding of evolution and the paths nature takes is limited.
In his 2003 book, Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep, Loren Coleman writes:
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