The Loch Ness Monster Literally Can’t Look Like You Think, Scientists Say

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For centuries, the legendary Loch Ness Monster has often been imagined as a creature that swims with extreme vertical undulations.
Nothing like the arched version of Nessie has ever been found to exist, and probably because those motions would slow her down.
Most eyewitness accounts of Nessie sightings do not describe arches, so if she does exist, she probably looks like what these witnesses think they saw.

If there ever was anything such as a poster cryptid, it would have to be Nessie (sorry Bigfoot). The Loch Ness Monster of Scottish lore has often been depicted as a serpentine creature undulating vertically in the water. There is just one problem with these images—that kind of body cannot exist.

Ancient texts going back to the sixth century A.D. describe sightings of a “watery beast” lurking in the depths of the loch. Since then, version of Nessie slithering in vertical arches has been on every possible souvenir, from shirts and hats to books, postcards, mugs, stuffed animals and just about everything else imaginable. If this is the Nessie that lives rent-free in most people’s minds, sightings of what was thought to be the monster should match. It turned out that most witnesses saw something completely different.

Despite the stereotype, most sighting reports of what could be Nessie are missing those iconic vertical loops. Even the infamous 1934 hoax, which had the masses believing Nessie was some sort of leftover plesiosaur from the late Cretaceous, showed only a long neck and part of her back. Almost everyone who could have sworn they saw a monster has given an account of something explicitly unlike the arched images. A 1933 report printed in The Inverness Courier described her body as “resembling that of a whale.”

Later sightings continued to claim Nessie resembled a whale, complete with appendages that appeared to be fins. Others were unclear but described something huge in the water. After investigating stacks of blurry photos and other evidence, ecologist Charles Paxton of St. Andrews University and Adrian Shine of the Loch Ness Centre came to a conclusion about what Nessie must look like if she actually exists. So few reports of a thing with arches versus the plethora of images with them can only mean that pop culture has not influenced ideas of what eyewitnesses at least thought they saw.

“This insight supports the contention that the majority of eyewitness reports are actually based on some underlying physical reality, even if not representing an actual encounter with an unknown species,” Paxton and Shine said in a study recently published in Endeavour.

Nothing extant or extinct is known to have Nessie’s imagined body, which features what the researchers call “vertical flexations so extreme as to show arches.” Were her pop-culturally accepted form be correct, it would actually impede the ability to swim. They instead think that vertical arches surfaced from a way to show that the creature slithered through the water even if the depiction wasn’t literal. Sea snakes, eels and most fish undulate from side to side. Marine mammals such as whales have flexible spines that allow them to swim with vertical undulations, surfacing briefly and revealing their backs, and then plunge into the deep again. It might seem like a vertical undulation above water from a distance.

While no DNA of actual sea snakes, whales, plesiosaurs and many other suspected Nessies has ever been found in Loch Ness, mental comparisons to known animals such as these may consider the way these animals briefly appear above water and the curvature of their bodies. This may also have contributed to the arched version of the cryptid in question and other alleged swimming monsters. Some sightings turned out to be nothing more than logs or boat debris, and it is plausible that multiple scraps of floating junk could give an arched impression.

Paxton argues that claims of anything with multiple arches swimming in the loch is less likely to be Nessie—if she exists—than something matching the description of Nessie from most eyewitness accounts. She would have to look like what the overwhelming majority has described over the last century. Meanwhile, the search continues.

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