Some More Plesiosaur Lake Monster Info From Scott Mardis

Scott Mardis compares Lake Champlain and Loch Ness photographs with Plesiosaur skeletons above, and a view of a photograph of the head with the skull of a Plesiosaur at the British Museum.

 

Scott Mardis included this reconstruction of a type of Plesiosaur with a "back fin"-this would not ordinarily show up in fossils and a lower fleshy structure like this could have been more of a hump structure and serve the same purpose. Scott Mardis also suggested to me that there could be a natural tendency to develop two medial back humps above the front and rear limb girdles: the same possibility had occurred to me independently several years earlier, and others had also independently remarked upon it. The basic structures would be made up of skin over connective tissue, but you could also include a fatty layer in that, some kinds of sea creatures store fat in or near the fins.

 

 

Scott Mardis' overlay of a Champ sighting over a Plesiosaur skeleton and showing the known range of motion in the neck in that genus. I do not think the difference in the flexibility as stated by the witness was that severely different, and the main new feature to be present and not shown are the humps on the back. I prefer Heuvelman's description of the hump in Longnecks: "One big medial hump looking like two otr three smaller humps together", with underlying layers of fat underneath it, and the humps can change shape owing to turbulence waves in the wayter and from the action of muscular layers in it (Oudemans even suggested this last statement)

 

Below is a summary of sightings from Loch Morar, and the sightings are typically much like the composite profile that we get from the Longnecked reports at Loch Ness

 (there is also a smaller residual of smaller shortnecked creatures in both locations)

 

 

 

Tim Dinsdale with his model he made illustrating his analysis of the "Monster" reports at Loch Ness. He had two different basic models, one with the two humps illustrated in his drawing in the book, and the three-humped version he shows in this model. He also said that it really did not matter since he thought the humps could change shape. Basically we are all saying the same thing on that point. Dinsdale thought the humps were showing subcutaneous air sacs but after some deliberation I opted for Heuvelmans' explanation as being safer.

 

Tim Dinsdale remarked that the body configuration of the creature in this sighting (seen partly on shore) was close to his composite model but made independently before his model was publicized. The drawing also "Predicted" the rhomboid fins that were not documented as belonging to the Loch Ness Monster until much later on.

 

Hawkesbury River Monster from Australia, frequently compared to Dinsdale's version of Nessie and in fact often called just "Nessie. The worldwide overall similarity of the reported creatures is actually quite close and the same features and proportions keep showing up.

Lake Champlain Rhombopteryx

 

 

I was sent this by Jay Cooney some time back but I decided to wait until he had a go at publishing it himself. It seems to represent a Plesiosaur-shaped creature in this footage taken at Lake Champlain and it seems to have the same sort of a flipper as is ascribed to the Loch Ness Monster.  The original footage is known as the Bodette video. Scott Mardis has also remarked upon this. Below is an animated gif which seems to show the creature opening and shutting its mouth
http://makeagif.com/bkySa_#MQYupTGpevK1Csze.01

Muppet Faced Nessies

Submitted Article From Scott Mardis

Scott Mardis Lake Champlain Sighting

Details of Scott Mardis' sighting of an unknown presumed animal on Lake Champlain, letter shared with Dick Raynor:

I was approximately where the red dot on the map is shown. Where you see the green dot is the general direction of my sighting.

Battery park sits elevated on a bluff with lowlands spreading out by the waterfront. I was sitting on a bench.

 

As best as I could, using this photo, I tried to illustrate the general direction of my sighting angle looking out toward the water (below, green dot).

 

Can't remember the exact model of the binoculars I was using but they were Nikons very much like these.

 

 
Here is what I saw through binoculars:

The whole encounter was over in like 40 seconds. Like Dinsdale, I saw a boat go by later in the same general area, approximately the same length as my "object". Later on I found a boat like the one I saw and it was about 15 feet long, so I figured 15 feet was about the length of my whats-it.

[The object off to the one side in the second photo is thought to have been a flipper owing to the way it attaches to the body with more of the body sticking out below it-DD]

[15 feet is in general the statistical standard size for the body (torso) in reports of such creatures worldwide, although many reports round that up to 20 feet and sightings at sea tend to be estimated as larger. This also matches the Mokele-mBembe because 15 feet is also about the length of your standard hippo and the Mokele-mBembe is also said to have a body of that length.-DD]

Champ Update from Scott Mardis

Account of 1974 sighting of Champ [...]
Retold- June 21, 2000

 Hi Dennis,

 An old timer told me this account many years ago and I know the man wasn't lying. He asked that I never repeat it to anyone, using his name. He's dead now, so I don't think he'd mind. Anyway, he said that many years ago (I think in the early 1970s) he and his granddaughter were fishing from shore near the "cow banks," which is on South Hero.
It was very early morning, in July I believe. He said suddenly they heard loud "breathing sounds." When they looked down the shore they saw a huge animal pull itself up onto the shore. With binoculars he observed it, from about 150 yards away. I am enclosing a sketch I have done from memory, of the sketch he drew for me, of what it looked like and it's approximate size. He did say it was VERY big, weighing tons. He said steam-like breath came from two appendages on it's nose, which retracted even, as it was breathing. He said he could hear the breath sounds, even from that great distance! He said it had two large "flappers" for front feet. As they rose to try to get a little closer, it saw them and quickly backed back into the lake and was gone. He said it was the 2nd time they had seen it there, once a couple years previously, but well out into the lake, swimming, then sounding. He said he KNEW "Champ" existed, as he'd seen it twice with his own eyes. He swore to me he was being honest, and I never knew this man to even lie about the size of the fish he caught. He was a retired school teacher and a respectable man, in my opinion. Attached is my rendition of his
sketch.
-Jim
 (from Champquest archives at the Wayback Machine).

 And Scott added some comparisons to this report when he sent it to me. The first compares the outline in this sighting at Lake Champlain to that of the Margaret Munro sighting at Loch Ness, both only partly ashore.

 The second pasteup has to do with Plesiosaur nostrils as reconstructed from fossils and it illustrates the idea that the "Horns" are erectile nostrils that act as snorkels (The illustration at upper right is a moray eel)

 Scott's other comparison compiles various views from Champ as depicted by different witnesses over the years

 

And now for comparisons of my own. First off, the Champ in this case is

very much smaller that the Loch Ness sighting Scott compares it to: 

But then again the head-neck in each case is strikingly like the Surgeon's photo at Loch Ness

 

And I will concede the point about the horns on the face being erectile nostrils, it is the usual interpretation among Cryptozoologists that study such reports.

Scott Mardis Additional on Mansi photo at Lake Champlain

Comparison by Scott Mardis of the Lake Champlain Mansi photo with a Plesiosaur skeleton and with a carved horn artifact from Vermont of the Colonial age. This also looks like a very firm connection.

Jay Cooney has also just published Scott's article on the Mansi photo on the Bizzare Zoology blog:
http://www.bizarrezoology.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-on-an-analysis-of-mansi-photograph.html

More from Scott Mardis

Development stages of the common European eel

The Leptocephalus stage is at the bottom.

Supplemental Giant Eel Sea Serpent Illustrations from Scott Mardis

Another Loch Ness Monster Submission from Scott Mardis

Scott Mardis made this comparison between the Loch Ness Monster as reported by William Campbell and one of the Rines underwater pictures. I thought it was pretty spot-on and very suggestive as evidence.

Comment by Jay C on Zombie Plesiosaur Society Facebook Group: I concur with Dale! Excellent work. The photographic data supports the anecdotal data and vice versa.

Sir Peter Scott Nessie Via Scott Mardis

 

Artwork by Sir Peter Scott depicting hypothetical Loch Ness plesiosaurs, 1975.
Submitted by Scott Mardis

The top figure in the original illustration was too dark and had to be left off.. I find these to be in good agreement with my general model except for the nonappearance of a midline-dorsal fleshy crest or fringe here, and the base of the neck has less of a taper to it in this version, which in my model performs the function of a shock absorber for the neck while swimming forward. For mechanical reasons something like that will be important to the functioning of a living animal. The small size of the head and the thinness of the forward portion of the neck are indeed close to the statistical averages here, a head two feet long and a neck a foot thick behind the head being typical proportions for a 40 foot animal (Halve that for a 20 foot animal, and at the current time I think 20 to 40 feet long is a sound estimate for the standard size in these animals. The smaller end of the size range would be the females and the larger end of size estimates would be the males, and more inexact estimates of the size at 150% to 200% of the standard are common in some areas, such as at high seas, where size estimates tend to be less accurate generally. That yields 30 to 60 feet long at 150% and 40 to 80 feet long at 200% of standard size estimations, and these correspond to the basic size range estimations for "Longnecks" and "Merhorses" as given by Bernard Heuvelmans in In The Wake of the Sea Serpents)

compare to:
 http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2013/08/longneck-loch-ness-monster-composites.html

Statements made about sizes and proportions are the end products of an exhaustive study I made while I was with the SITU and had access to Sanderson's files: the statistical analysis included every known report of Sea Serpents and Lake Monsters at the time and the final results were submitted to the SITU in 1980 in the form of a 100 page report that was never published. I still have a draft of the 100 page report. The reports were taken all together as a whole and then again in various subcategories, including reports from each lake or series of lakes, and from geographic subsections of the sea and sea coast, and as an evaluation of Heuvelmans' categories from In The Wake of the Sea Serpents as measured one against the others. This study found a uniformity between most reports and a general agreement between the reports in each of Heuvelmans' categories, but resulted in the unexpected result that nearly all "String of buoys" sightings were probably due to wave effects, and that this category was the largest one for "Unknowns" worldwide. The results for the remaining sea-serpents in general, the Loch Ness Monster, Champ of Lake Champlain, the Heuvelmans category of Longnecks, and even the Patagonian Plesiosaurs, were all closely similar. Counter to Heuvelmans there was not any good reason to consider Longnecks to be tailless, tails still featured in about 10% of the reports, a proportion similar to the Loch Ness Monster reports: and while the longnecked section of Merhorses was also similar to the Longnecks, there were also clearly different kinds of Merhorses differentiated by the length of the necks. One subsection of Merhorse reports surprisingly turned out to be the proper size and proportions to match elephant seals after the statistics were compiled. "?LN?SE" reports also tested out as being mostly identical to the regular Longnecks statistically.

Loch Ness Underwater Photos from Scott Mardis, additional

The Rines "Two Bodies" photo, which correspond to a sonar trace showing the presence of two large features (about 30 feet long) in the scanned field simultaneously. The longer projection or flipper is estimated as being 6 to 8 feet long and corresponds to the separate "Flipper" photos (1975)

In 1975, vertebrate paleontologist L.B. Halstead pointed out that the rhomboidal flippers seen in the Rines Loch Ness underwater photos from 1972 did not match the hydrofoil shape of then-current reconstructions of plesiosaur flipper shapes, based on skin outlines preserved around some plesiosaur flipper specimens (Hydrodrion brachypterygius and Seelyosaurus guillelmi-imperatoris). A May 2013 Master’s thesis by vertebrate paleontologist Mark Cruz DeBlois may question that assertion. Using hydrodynamic principles in combination with advanced mathematical formulas, DeBlois has produced a predicted plesiosaur flipper shape for the front flippers of the plesiosaur Cryptocleidus eurymerus that is much closer to the rhomboidal shape of the Rines flippers, with a much larger trailing edge of flesh that extends beyond the flipper bones (see upper left, blue and red outlines). Read it for yourself athttp://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1502&context=etd

 
 Traditional reconstructions of plesiosaur flipper morphology and plesiosaur flipper skin impressions: (clockwise from top left) the front and rear flippers of Hydrodrion brachypterygius, the right rear flipper of the "Collard plesiosaur" from the UK, a typical model of the traditional proposed plesiosaur flipper morphology and sketches of the skin impressions surrounding the flippers of the plesiosaurs Seelyosaurus guillelmi-imperatoris and Hydrodrion brachypterygius.

DeBlois' hypothesized front flipper of Hydrodrion brachypterygius overlayed on the second Rines "flipper" image.

In 1975 the biggest breakthrough for Dr. Rines and his team came when a set of close-up underwater photographs were taken which when released in December of that year caused a worldwide sensation. The pictures which show the head and body of one of the creatures in remarkable detail, were taken with the Edgerton strobe camera during the expedition the previous June.For several months the pictures were examined in secret in zoological centres in Britain, America, Canada and Europe. It was planned to release them in early December at a scientific symposium in Edinburgh to be attended by zoologists from all over the world under the chairmanship of the famous British naturalist and painter Sir Peter Scott. News of the pictures leaked out at the end of November, before the study of them was complete and caused such excitement that the sponsors of the symposium, who included the prestigious Royal Society, felt it would be impossible to conduct a proper scientific discussion in such an atmosphere. Consequently the symposium, at which the whole Loch Ness controversy would have been debated at length and hopefully resolved, had to be cancelled. In its place a meeting was held in the Grand Committee Room at the Houses of Parliament at the instigation of David James, the MP who had led the Investigation Bureau. Before a large audience of members of both houses of Government, scientists and journalists, the Academy team presented the results of their research, including the new underwater photographs, together with supporting statements from eminent zoologists who had been examining the material. Dr. George Zug, the Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians at the renowned Smithsonian Institution in Washington said in his personal statement : "I believe these data indicate the presence of large animals in Loch Ness, but are insufficient to indentify them ".

The nearly universal reaction is that the photographs show something which looks very much like a long-necked Plesiosaur. The photo sequence is shown here in two alternate orientations.

First Look At Caddy Via Scott Mardis

Scott Mardis:
Charles Eagle's eyewitness sketch of his "Cadborosaurus" from 1933, with a pronounced underbite. This resembles the alligator with an underbite in the photo. Note: it is believed that some plesiosaurs had teeth that protruded out like those of crocodilians.

Dale Drinnon:
The head of the creature as shown does have that distinctive wedge shape that some plesiosaurs had, highest at the back of the head and tapering toward the snout:

But it would seem to me that the vertical profile is exaggerated and the entire creature made to be too thick. This might be due to poor drawing but also could be an effect of the viewing conditions. Below are the skull and the reconstruction of Styxosaurus from the Oceans of Kansas website
http://www.oceansofkansas.com/plesiosaur.html




And some scientists have suspected that the head of our surviving Plesiosaurs would have looked like this (They were classified together) This is speculative, however.
If the Caddy in question had a Plesiosaur's head, though, the opening in the back of the skull would be the Euryapsid skull openings, the eye sockets would be that other hump abut halfway along the length of the head. Mistaking the rear openings of the skull for eye sockets is a mistake which laymen frequently make.

Oudemans_Great_Sea-Serpent

The proportionate lengths given for this "Cadborosaurus" atre very like Oudemans' reconstructed sea serpent with its exaggeratedly long tail (Half of the full length) and this is probably due to a confusion with the wake. The thickness of 8 feet is very nearly doubled over Oudemans' version and so it is an independant indicator that the Vertical thickness was much exaggerated in this sighting.

It is notable that in this first Cadborosaurus sighting there is a spiny ridge down the middle of the back and not a mane as such.

Scott said the original source was Cadborosaurus: Survivor of the Deep. He also sends some other photo comparisons but in the non-Plesiosaur examples the head is too long and the wrong shape, and the length of the neck is much to short:

Vertical height decreased by one half and is much better in line with other sightings. there are a number of things which could cause this optical illusion but the most obvious would be confusion of the actual body with its reflection on the surface of the water. The inset drawing shows the head and the orange circle indicates where the eye should be (A number of sightings suggest the eyes are cryptically coloured the same as the skin but the Euryapsid opening in the top back of the skull might have false eyespots (Ocelli) that draw attacks instead of the real eyes.)