An emergency meeting was held at which the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot and the demigods from the planet Nibiru discussed the loss of interest in them, even among dumb Russian housewives. This joke about the TV-3 channel has been circulating on the Internet for a long time. But despite the fact that such topics are considered yellow, a scientific approach is quite applicable to them.
Loch Ness monster
The first who told the world about the mysterious Nessie are Roman legionnaires, who, with a sword in their hands, mastered the Celtic expanses at the dawn of the Christian era. Seeing the handiwork of the Celts (who immortalized in stone all representatives of the Scottish fauna, from mouse to deer) - a stone statue of a strange long-necked seal of enormous size, they could not identify it.
In general, Nessie's appearance is rather vague. The legendary Scottish monster is believed to resemble either a plesiosaur or a giant eel-like creature.
Plesiosaur skeleton
Getty Images
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Indeed, the fact that several individuals of the plesiosaur did survive in some secluded corner of the planet is theoretically possible, although very unlikely. So, coelacanth (coelacanth) was also considered extinct 65 million years ago, until … it was discovered in 1938. This event came as a shock to the scientific community. Since then, in fact, only a few individuals of the coelacanth genus have been discovered, so the fish is considered extremely rare and is among the living fossils.
The version that the Loch Ness monster looks like a plesiosaur was especially widespread after the so-called "surgeon's photograph" - the London doctor Kenneth Wilson, who claimed to have photographed the animal by accident. In 1994, it turned out that the picture was a fake.
For centuries, sailors have spoken of enormous sea monsters. But even in those distant times, the latter were only heroes of novels: no one really took them seriously. But the monsters really existed, they were discovered and called giant sea squids.
The bigmouth shark was discovered only in 1976 off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands. The giant animal reaches 5 m in length and weighs up to 750 kg. These elusive creatures have been seen less than 40 times. All this allows us to conclude that extremely large animals can remain unnoticed for decades and even hundreds of years.
However, Loch Ness is not an ocean and has been explored in much more detail. In addition, according to paleontologists, plesiosaurs were animals that often came to the surface. This means that if plesiosaurs lived in the lake, they would definitely be seen on land and reliably captured a long time ago. But this does not happen - Nessie does not appear on the shores of the lake.
Also, a plesiosaur cannot be in the water in the position in which it is supposedly seen. In this case, he must either sit in shallow water or break his neck. This situation is contrary to the anatomy of the animal.
The Loch Ness Monster as seen by the artist
Alamy
Some, meanwhile, believe that Nessie is not a plesiosaur at all, but simply a new biological species, still unknown to science. But this view is definitely gigantic. Is this possible? Experts are sure: no. And all because Loch Ness is considered extremely scarce in terms of food, the amount of food that a large animal could find in these waters would simply not be enough for it to survive. Sound scanning showed that there is only 20 tons of biomass in the reservoir, which is enough to support the life of one living creature weighing no more than 2 tons, and this is not such a giant (plesiosaurs, as we remember, even reached a weight of 20 tons). But there should be not one or two such creatures here, but at least 15 to 30 individuals - so that they can maintain their own survival.
Attention to the Loch Ness monster was drawn in the 20s of the last century. Since then, he has allegedly been seen more than 10 thousand times. However, all attempts to find "stop and bark" have led nowhere. And this despite the fact that for such a good cause, the most modern equipment was used, in particular, sonars and deep-sea cameras that can see in the dark.
The legend of Nessie has been actively discussed in the media and has been promoted by the local tourism business for about 80 years. It is difficult to assume that at the same time, for several decades, it was not possible to obtain even a clear photograph of the animal, if it really existed. But in the end - nothing: not a monster, not even his remains.
Loch Ness is 36 km long and 1.5 km wide. But the depth is almost 240 m, that is, this lake is deeper than the North Sea. In addition, the pond contains a very large amount of peat, which means almost zero visibility under water. And at the bottom there are many underwater caves and tunnels. Maybe this gives dreamers a reason to keep talking about the Loch Ness monster?
Nessie may turn out to be a simple sturgeon, which is found in the Ness River. The giant sturgeon is one of the largest freshwater fish in British waters. According to scientists, it can live for over 100 years. This fish lives quite secluded and at the very bottom, it can rarely be seen on the surface.
Loch Ness Monster Exhibition Center
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But how to explain so much evidence of the mysterious Nessie? Too many eyewitnesses have seen "something inexplicable" in the lake. Some of them were even tested with a lie detector, and it turned out that they were telling the truth. But this is not yet proof: the results of a polygraph test only prove that eyewitnesses believe in the existence of a monster, that they have seen something, but this does not mean that this something exists. Most people tend to see what they want - a Loch Ness monster, not a log or a piece of plastic. This happens every day unnoticed with each of us. And people's memory is not a frozen process, but a rather changing structure. When reconstructing memories, our brain completely unconsciously "completes" the originally missing details: the head or paws of a log, for example.
It is worth, of course, to say that similar legends about a huge and mysterious underwater monster are found among very many peoples around the globe (for example, in Africa, the Okanagan Lake monster in Canada, Kanas Lake in China, Labynkyr Lake in Yakutia and many others), they are just less well known.
Snowman
It is also called sasquatch, bigfoot, yeti, enzhe, avdoshka, almasty. He has many names, as well as many of the most likely "candidates" for the role of a mysterious creature: gigantopithecus, Pleistocene mega-anthrope (large anthropoid monkey), Neanderthal and even a bear.
Over the past 50 years, more than 37 thousand certificates have been collected about Bigfoot in Canada and the United States alone. But the most famous bigfoot is the one that was allegedly filmed in a California forest on October 20, 1967 by two farmers, yeti hunters Roger Paterson and Bob Gimli. The film shows a humanoid figure covered with hair, crossing the bed of a dry stream.
Still from "short" by Roger Paterson and Bob Gimli
Youtube
Until now, this short video, a minute long, is considered one of the most mysterious "evidence" of the Yeti's existence. Experts have found that the creature on it moves by the so-called "pliable gait", somewhat different from the confident gait of a person. With a compliant gait, the body leans forward, the knees remain bent, and the foot touches the ground with the entire surface, and not as in a person when the heel touches the first ground. During the experiment, biomechanical researchers, together with an actor and animator, decided to reproduce this gait. It turned out that this is not easy, but quite real. This means that a person is able to reproduce the gait of a creature from the Paterson and Gimli film.
But the most important "proof" is that the proportions of the yeti from the film do not coincide with human proportions. Many of them are simply impossible to fake. For example, a knee bend that no costume can make up. Sasquatch Paterson and Gimli also have a long upper (up to the knee) part of the leg that is completely atypical for humans. It is not surprising that many experts, after analyzing all these features, came to the conclusion that the video clearly depicts a monkey or a similar anthropoid animal - and hardly a person dressed in an elaborate costume.
Among other things, the flat-footed figure from the film fits well with the flat footprints of the yeti found all over the world. It is known, however, that many of the prints of these traces were deliberately left by forgers. The most famous of these is perhaps the one Ray Wallis, who supposedly left hundreds of footprints using giant models of feet carved from wood.
A famous "confirmation" of the existence of Bigfoot is a certain object, which for a long time passed off as his scalp.
It was only in 2013 that the report of Brian Sykes, professor of genetics at Oxford University, was published. According to the results of analyzes published in the report, the DNA of the hair is completely identical to the DNA of an ancient polar bear that existed more than 40 thousand years ago and was closely related to the brown bear. Sasquatch from a Nepalese monastery turned out to be an ancient bear.
Bigfoot "scalp" kept in one of the monasteries in Nepal
Flickr
However, the absolute majority of scientists do not even think of looking for a Yeti: this topic is too frivolous. Unless for the sake of attracting the general public to science. Answering the question about the possible existence of Bigfoot, the famous anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky on the Antropogenesis.ru website said: “I would very much like the“Bigfoot”to exist, but it is alarming that he is not there. Fairy tales about suggestion and extraordinary cunning should be left on the conscience of Porshnev's fans. If there was a yeti, they would have caught him long ago, or at least found something. Of course, as an anthropologist, I really want to study some Almast or Bigfoot, especially since, purely hypothetically, there is nothing incredible in its existence. There is a gorilla, there is an orangutan, there is a man, why not be a descendant of Neanderthals, Sivapithecus or Gigantopithecus,stuck in the Pamirs? But with the factual matter it is quite a problem. All the evidence ever presented has turned out to be fake in our time. It's a pity … “We were catching demons in all the royal chambers! Grab it - but there is no demon!"
Unicorn
Despite the seemingly clear fabulous subtext, the mythical creature symbolizing chastity and spiritual purity also made it onto our list. And all because there is nothing supernatural in the very image of the unicorn. The unicorn is usually represented as a horse with one horn emanating from the forehead.
The earliest images of unicorns were found in India, and they are more than 4 thousand years old. Then unicorn myths began to appear in Western Asia. And in Ancient Greece and Rome, unicorns were considered to be real animals. In addition, images of the unicorn can be found in ancient Egyptian monuments and on the rocks of southern Africa. True, in the latter case, the drawings represent species of antelope with straight horns, which are drawn in profile and without regard to perspective, and therefore seem to be one-horned.
Early traditions depicted a unicorn with the body of a bull, a goat and a horse; in some cases, a unicorn with elephant legs and a boar's tail can be found. This was the reason to think that the prototype of the unicorn is the rhinoceros. True, not modern, but rather ancient - Elasmotherium (the rhinoceros of the Eurasian steppes, who lived there during the Ice Age). Images of this prehistoric animal can be found in the rock art of those times. Why exactly Elasmotherium? The fact is that Elasmotherium partly resembled a horse with an extremely long horn in its forehead. It is believed to have died out at the same time as the rest of the Eurasian glacial megafauna. But some scientists, such as the popularizer of science Willie Leigh, believethat Elasmotherium died out later and managed to get into the legends and myths of the ancient Evenks in the form of a huge black bull with one horn in its forehead.
Elasmotherium
Wikimedia Commons
The ancient Roman writer, author of "Natural History" Pliny considered India and central Africa to be the birthplace of unicorns. In one of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the unicorn is completely distinguished by a very aggressive disposition, therefore, some researchers suggest that the prototype of the unicorn can indeed be an animal that looks like a rhino not only in appearance, but also in character.
In the Bible, the unicorn ("reem") is presented as a fast, dangerous, ferocious (Ps. 21:22) and freedom-loving (Job 39: 9) animal. But today the majority of modern translators of the Bible call "reema" bison or wild buffalo, which became extinct several centuries ago.
Therefore, the prototype of the unicorn could well have been (and probably did) a completely terrestrial animal, for example, a rhinoceros, bison or antelope. Moreover, the latter could really look like a "unicorn". Cases of the birth of one-horned animals (which in fact should be two-horned) are known to science. So, in 2008 in Tuscany, a ten-month-old male roe deer was discovered, on the top of which a single horn gracefully flaunted. The roe deer lives and lives to this day, and was even transported to the conservation center of the city of Prato (France) - for safety.
Roe deer male from Tuscany
Alamy
Among other things, one-horned animals can also be obtained artificially, through a not very complicated "plastic" operation. Such, for example, was carried out by a biologist from the University of Maine (USA) W. Franklin Dove in 1933. The method is based on the anatomical features of ruminants, whose horns do not grow directly from the skull, but from a build-up of horny tissue. For a newborn Yorkshire calf, the biologist transplanted two horny growths into the center of the forehead, resulting in a long, straight horn. Such a "ugliness", paradoxically, gave the matured bull self-confidence, since the straight central horn in the form of a weapon was used more effectively by him. A similar operation could have been carried out in time immemorial. Pliny the Elder, in the eleventh book of his Natural History, mentions a casewhen modified horns were also obtained from one horny growth. True, in the end there were four of them, not one.
Kraken
But with this monster, which is a huge cephalopod mollusks from the descriptions of Icelandic sailors (from whose language the word "kraken" comes), there is perhaps more clarity than with the rest of the world of mythical monsters.
The first detailed taxonomy of the Kraken legends belongs to the Danish naturalist Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, who described the monster "as large as a floating island." According to Pontoppidan, the kraken is able to grab and drag to the bottom even the largest warship of those years (XVIII century). But even more dangerous for ships is the cycle that the giant creates, sinking to the bottom.
According to the same Pontoppidan, in order to digest the food eaten, the animal needs three months, during which it will excrete a huge amount of nutritious excrement. Therefore, the kraken is always followed by large schools of fish. In this regard, there was even a saying about a fisherman who had an exceptional catch: "I was fishing on a kraken."
For obvious reasons, the scientific community has been very critical of the sailors' tales for a long time, explaining the sudden and dangerous change of currents for ships by volcanic activity off the coast of Iceland. It was only in 1857 that the existence of the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), which apparently became the prototype of the kraken, was fully proven.
Architeutis, of course, is not the size of an island, but, according to modern data, its length can reach about 16.5 m. However, the cryptozoologist Mikhail Goldenkov "rehabilitated" the sailors even in this seemingly natural exaggeration. In his opinion, evidence of the size of the kraken and "thousands of tentacles" does not indicate that such an animal did not exist, but only that the unfortunate sailors had to face a flock of giant squids (since their smaller species are also schooling animals, you can suggest that gregariousness is also characteristic of their larger counterparts). But a creature the size of an island could hardly exist: according to experts, it would simply be torn apart by the slightest storm.
Meanwhile, the giant squid is not the leader. An even larger species is the Antarctic giant squid, which is also called the "colossal squid". Only the eye of this giant is about 30 cm in diameter, and the weight reaches almost 500 kg. True, these terrible monsters are found at great depths - from 200 to 2 thousand meters.
The Dragon
Probably no other mythical monster has turned out to be so popular both in the legends and tales of very many peoples of the Earth, and in modern fantasy, as the dragon. He is a creature with a reptile body, sometimes combined with body parts of other animals. Other common characteristics of a dragon are flying ability, having multiple heads or tails, fiery breath, and intelligence.
Certain difficulties arise in connection with the coincidence of the images of the dragon and the serpent. Thus, the word "serpent" has been found in Slavic texts since the 11th century (including the Bible of 1663), and the word "dragon" was borrowed from the Greek language only in the 16th century. In the King James Bible, the words "serpent", "dragon" and "devil" are synonymous.
Only in the 19th century, the "serpent" was renamed into "dragon" - apparently because the latter name had already come into widespread use. However, the history of the use of these words indicates that they denoted the same creature.
There is even an opinion that the prototype of the legends about dragons could be the skeletons of dinosaurs, which were found by our distant ancestors, but, of course, could not identify them in any way.
According to other researchers, the dragon is simply a collective, uniting image of the so-called upper world (which in this case is symbolized by birds) and the lower (snakes). The division of the world into upper (pure, spiritual, masculine) and lower (carnal, earthly, feminine) is present in the early religious beliefs of all peoples of our planet. In other words, the dragon may not have a real prototype from the animal world; it may act as a contamination of these animals, which in turn are only symbols of more internal, psychological images.
The symbols of something strong and powerful, coming from the inside, from the unconscious person, however, can be called, however, all other mythical monsters (even if they have more real prototypes from the animal world). It is this symbolic, psychological component that can be called the main source of these myths, while real prototypes are secondary. No wonder legends about monsters never go out of style.
Olga Fadeeva