Why nessie exists

This happens when people who expect or want to see something are more likely to misinterpret visual cues as the thing that they expect or want to see. This likely also happens with recently extinct animals. Even so, people often still report seeing them. Read more: Why won't scientific evidence change the minds of Loch Ness monster true believers? Still, Gemmell acknowledges that there is uncertainty. Science being science, we can never say with total confidence that there is no Loch Ness Monster.

Rest easy, monster hunters. Nessie lives on. They found no DNA that would theoretically match a prehistoric reptile's, and no traces of more commonplace animals that could be mistaken for one, like sharks, catfish, or sturgeons.

But they did find eel DNA. A massive eel would line up with some of the descriptions from Nessie sightings, and eels usually migrate up rivers and into lakes in Scotland. On top of that, it's possible, Gemmell claims, that an extraordinarily long-lived eel could grow as long as 13 feet. It's a long-shot explanation, but as he told the Post , it's good publicity: "I am unashamedly using the monster as a way to attract interest so I can talk about the science I want to talk about.

Indeed, the organic productivity of Loch Ness is so low that even the most optimistic calculations show that a population of large aquatic animals could not survive here, and certainly not for generations. A giant, hairy, man-shaped monster famous for leaving human-like footprints. Originally associated with California, cryptozoologists believe that it occurs across North America and even beyond.

An animal — argued by cryptozoologists to represent an unknown species or subspecies — that has been described by witnesses but remains unconfirmed by science. The investigative field that aims to discover and study animals that are alleged to exist, but are as yet only known from anecdotal evidence.

An elephant-sized water monster of the Congo region, imagined by proponents to be a long-necked herbivore and perhaps a surviving sauropod dinosaur. A giant, winged beast of New Guinea, said to be bioluminescent and to eat human corpses. Its proponents — most of whom are creationists — believe it to be a surviving pterosaur, a flying reptile otherwise thought to have died out 66 million years ago. Similar arguments can be applied to other monsters.

It would appear to be the commonest, most widely distributed non-human primate on the planet, occurring in places that cannot reasonably be regarded as potential haunts for a huge, as-yet-undiscovered mammal.

Unlike Nessie, Bigfoot at least has some hard evidence put forward in support of it. Similar marks were noticed on other tracks, and they were taken by proponents as powerful support for the reality of Bigfoot.

These are formed in plaster as it sets: they are not proof of the biological reality of Bigfoot, but an accidental consequence of plaster casting. A study claimed to have catalogued both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from Bigfoot, showing that the beast is a hybrid between Homo sapiens and a second species of unknown ancestry. But independent checks by several geneticists revealed the results to be bogus, with the DNA found to be a mix belonging to various North American mammals.

Decades of investigation have shown that a significant percentage of classic monster sightings can be explained as hoaxes or confused encounters with known animals or phenomena. For all this naysaying, however, the fact remains that people continue to report sightings of these beasts.

For years, folklorists and anthropologists have argued that modern ideas about monsters represent the vestiges of age-old folk beliefs in which dangerous places — deep lakes, dark forests, treacherous mountains — are associated with frightening creatures.