Champ Reconstructions Followup

The  owner of the Lake Monsters Facebook page went ahead and made up this lovely piece of artwork depicting a typical Lake monster (saying it could be Loch Ness or Lake Champlain, or anywhere where the Longnecked creatures venture inland) and using my composite published on this page recently. While this was unauthorised use of my image I was very glad to see it and I thanked him for making it up.

Scott Mardis had told me that some theorists at Lake Champlain think the creature could be a large turtle: Both Scott Mardis an I feel that an actual plesiosaur would be more likely than a giant turtle that looks so much like a plesiosaur otherwise.

Recently I mentioned Tim Dinsdale's reconstruction for the Loch Ness Monsteras coming out statistically close to mine, and so here is a news photo of a young Tim Dinsdale showing off his composite model, and below, the Australian version, which is nearly identical once again(allowing for 2 or 3 humps equally)

Scott Mardis sent some materials about the Australian Aboriginal Yarru, which he thought seemed to have small rounded rocks inside like the Plesiosaur's gatroliths

Driver, Rebecca. 1999. Australia’s Aborigines ... did they see dinosaurs? Creation Ex Nihilo 21(1):24–27.

Dennis Fields, a former missionary to Far North Queensland’s Kuku Yalanji tribespeople, told the CMIministry in Australia some years ago of a story the elders of the tribe told him, of a creature called Yarru (or Yarrba). The tribe inhabits the rainforest regions, where there are a number of waterholes in which, in earlier days, Yarru was said to live. There is a story of how the Yarru devoured a young maiden. The missionary asked one of the tribe’s artists to paint the story for him. The tribal artist, with very little formal education, had no knowledge of what so-called prehistoric animals looked like, and was drawing only from the descriptions handed down in the ancient stories. The painting (later donated to Creation International Ministries, and shown at the right [below]) shows a creature with a remarkable resemblance to the extinct Plesiosaurus.

Yarru or Yarrba (Plesiosaur) Painting

 European sightings of water monsters also often match this description.[11] Most evolutionists, however, find this unacceptable, since they insist such creatures vanished with the dinosaurs over 65 million years ago. For centuries, the Dharuk people have spoken of the mighty ‘Mirreeulla,’ whose home is the Hawkesbury River near Sydney. Sightings of plesiosaur-like creatures in this river have continued to modern times, with some estimating the creature at up to 15 metres (50 feet) long.

[11. Nessie’s kin? Creation 18(4):18, September 1996]

Scott also showed this diagram of an Elasmosaur to show where the gastroliths were located

And below a "Cadborosaurus" report with a 3-humped Plesiosaur-shaped creature giving some indication about the "Mane" (which is a point of contention in such reports). 

 This is actually another "Sea Giraffe" with a fairly short mane, described as being like a "fin" (fleshy material) and with a length of a few inches  (3-6 inches irregularly, it looks like from the witness' drawings)