While the only tangible evidence we have of Scotland’s famed Loch Ness Monster is a few grainy photographs, a real-life sea Scottish sea monster is has been unveiled to the public by National Museums Scotland.
Living around 170 million years ago, an ancient Scottish ichthyosaur nicknamed the Storr Lochs Monster has finally been debuted to the public after being encased in rock for around 50 years. Paleontologists hadn’t been able to release the specimen until recently-developed techniques allowed them to do so.
“For half a century the museum kept the fossil safe and secure, but there wasn’t the expertise to free it from the very dense rock that surrounded it, or the expertise to study it,” Steve Brusatte, a researcher from of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geoscience told the Agence-France Presse. “But now we finally have that expertise… and have realized that this skeleton is the most complete fossil of a sea reptile ever found in Scotland.”
Science Uncovering an Old Find
The marine reptile, which lacks a formal scientific designation yet, was found in 1966 by on the Isle of Skye. The specimen was carved out and carried back to the National Museums Scotland.
Official study of the fossil is only just commencing, but a few things are clear. The animal was an ichthyosaur measuring approximately 13 feet long and it lived in the Middle Jurassic, a relatively unknown period for palentologists. The conventional notion of what the Jurassic was comes from the Late Jurassic, when dinosaurs like Stegosaurus ruled the land and ichthyosaurs ruled the seas. The Storr Lochs Monster could provide more information about the Jurassic, incorporating more detail we can only picture through the bones of the creatures that once lived there.
According to Brusatte, these ancient, but real-life creatures are much more impressive than any fictional Scottish counterpart.
“People don’t realize that real sea monsters used to exist,” he said. “They were bigger, scarier, and more fascinating than the myth of Nessie. The new fossil is one of them. It actually lived in Scotland 170 million years ago!”
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Image credit: Univeristy of Edinborough
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