Claire Reid
Another Loch Ness Monster sighting has been logged after a local resident claimed to have seen the sea monster swimming for seven minutes.
Although it may seem like we get a new Nessie sighting every other week, according to the The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, the most recent one is only the fifth of this year, with the second most recent being in April.
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April seemed to be a pretty busy month for the monster, with three sightings in total - so that might be why she took a bit of a breather the last few months.
This Nessie spotting was on 27 August, as a listing about the sighting explains: "A local resident was on the hill above Lochend when they saw a wake moving against prevailing currents from Lochend in the direction of Drumnadrochit. There was no visible cause of wake. The sighting lasted seven minutes and they took some video footage."
Here is footage from the first official sighting this year:
Of course there are many reasons for people to doubt the existence of the Loch Ness Monster - not because the images captured tend to look like they’ve been shot with a potato - but also because the beast appears to have a long-neck and a small head similar to a plesiosaur - meaning it wouldn't be able to survive in Loch Ness, because it is a saltwater creature.
However, earlier this year, new research added some plausibility to the prospect of such a sea creature.
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However, scientists at the University of Bath, the University of Portsmouth in the UK, and Université Hassan II in Morocco found small plesiosaur fossils in a 100-million year old river system that is now Morocco's Sahara Desert.
The discovery of which suggests these creatures routinely lived and fed in freshwater, alongside frogs, crocodiles, turtles, fish, and the huge aquatic dinosaur, Spinosaurus.
Dr Nick Longrich, a corresponding author on the paper, said: "It's scrappy stuff, but isolated bones actually tell us a lot about ancient ecosystems and animals in them. They're so much more common than skeletons, they give you more information to work with.
"The bones and teeth were found scattered and in different localities, not as a skeleton. So each bone and each tooth is a different animal. We have over a dozen animals in this collection."
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He added: "We don't really know why the plesiosaurs are in freshwater.
"It's a bit controversial, but who's to say that because we palaeontologists have always called them 'marine reptiles', they had to live in the sea? Lots of marine lineages invaded freshwater."