Lake Champlain Baby Plesiosaur Sighting

Another One From Scott Mardis:

I remember seeing on one of your blogs an eyewtiness sketch of a sea serpent viewed from above that looks just like this baby champ in outline.

 

Eyewitness sketch of alleged juvenile "Champ" (3 ft. long) observed at Button Bay, Lake Champlain in 1993. Source Dennis Hall, Champquest.

For the record, Hall didn't see this. It was two women who he didn't name and they allegedly saw it swim between them while they were wading at Button Bay.

 

And my reply was:You are right and 3-4 feet (a yard or a meter) is just about the minimum length reported for longnecks. This is probably going on my blog, Lake Champlain is a key location.

 

In this undated artist rending provided by the National Science Foundation, a mother and juvenile plesiosaur are shown. Paleontologists last year unearthed one of the most complete plesiosaur skeletons, which is scheduled to be unveiled Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2006, in Rapid City, S.D. (Xinhua/AFP Photo) The article was about finding the skeleton in Antarctica and the baby Plesiosaur in this case was four feet long, the adults 30-35 feet long. This family of Plesiosaurs was known to tolerate colder water and to be able to live in both saltwater and freshwater, and is a good candidate to represent the later Loch Ness Monsters

 

[The very small individuals have been reported in Loch Ness and they are allegely captured every now and then the whole world over, throughout history.  However we don't seem to have and specimens in museum collections anywhere. One famous sighting of a 4 foot long bably Plesiosaur was by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle off of Greece

http://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2013/01/sir-arthur-conan-doyle-and-the-sea-monster.html
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle maintained a keen interest in prehistoric animals and paranormal events. In 1928, the creator of the unflappable detective Sherlock Holmes and his wife took a sea voyage to the island of Aegina. Standing on the deck of a steamer, they were gazing at the ancient Temple of Poseidon, god of the sea, on Cape Sounion. Suddenly they were distracted by something swimming parallel to the ship. Conan Doyle recalled that “the curious creature had a long neck and large flippers. I believe, as did my wife, that it was a young plesiosaurus.” Plesiosaurs were marine reptiles that went extinct along with dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Their shape strongly resembles the reported forms of typical sea monsters in the popular imagination, such as Nessie of Loch Ness. Perhaps this incident inspired Conan Doyle to write his story The Lost World, in which extinct creatures are brought back alive to London. [Doyle also heard of a similar creature being caught in a net off the coast of Australia]

The report has been criticised because Doyle called it both a Plesiosaur and an Ichthyosaur on different occasions (Many people do get the names of prehistoric animals wrong and so the difference is probably trivial)- DD]