Scientists have made a discovery in a 100 million year old river system that is now Morocco’s Sahara Desert

The existence of the Loch Ness monster may be “plausible”, an academic study has concluded after a loot of fossils was discovered in Morocco.

The beast has been part of folklore for centuries, and there have been countless alleged sightings, but no real proof that the mysterious creature actually exists.

Because Nessie appears to have a long neck and a small plesiosaur-like head, it is believed that he would be unable to survive Lock Ness because he is a saltwater creature. Plesiosaurs, first discovered in 1823, were prehistoric reptiles with small heads, long necks and four long fins.

Plesiosaur, said the University of Bath in a statementinspired reconstructions of the Loch Ness Monster, “but unlike the Loch Ness Monster, plesiosaurs were marine animals – or were widely believed to be such”.

#plesiosaurs were prehistoric reptiles with small heads, long necks and four long fins.

A new article from researchers in @MilnerCentre suggests that some species, traditionally considered sea creatures, may have lived in fresh water.https://t.co/w7UAQVlCf1 pic.twitter.com/bAyac3JWD5

— University of Bath (@UniofBath) July 26, 2022

This theory was somewhat challenged after scientists from the University of Bath, the University of Portsmouth in the UK and the Hassan II University in Morocco discovered small plesiosaur fossils in a 1000-year-old river system. 100 million years ago which is now the Sahara Desert in Morocco.

The fossils include adult bones and teeth three meters long and a baby’s arm bone 1.5 meters long.

The discovery suggests that the creatures lived and fed in fresh water, alongside frogs, crocodiles, turtles, fish and the aquatic dinosaur Spinosaurus and were adapted to tolerate fresh water, possibly even spending their lives there. , like today’s river dolphins.

The discovery, according to the University of Bath, makes Nessie’s story a bit more “plausible”.

However, as a rather large but, the university added that the fossil record “suggests that after nearly one hundred and fifty million years, the last plesiosaurs finally died out along with the dinosaurs, 66 million ago. of years”.

“It’s scrappy stuff, but isolated bones tell us a lot about ancient ecosystems and the animals that are there. They’re so much more common than skeletons, they give you more information to work with,” said said Dr. Nick Longrich, corresponding author on the article. , has explained.

“The bones and teeth were found scattered and in different localities, not in skeletal form. So each bone and each tooth is a different animal. We have over a dozen animals in this collection.”

He added: “We don’t really know why plesiosaurs are in fresh water.

“It’s a bit controversial, but who’s to say that because we paleontologists have always called them ‘marine reptiles,’ they had to live in the sea? Many marine lineages invaded fresh water.”

Co-author Dave Martill, professor of paleobiology at the University of Bath, added: “What amazes me is that the ancient Moroccan river contains so many carnivores all living side by side.

“It was not a place to go swimming.”

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