Loch Ness monster ain't no dino: study

Amy Bonin, DiscoveryChannel.ca

If such a creature exists, new research shows how the Loch Ness monster could have never been a plesiosaur.

The legend of Nessie has been around for decades, with imaginative people describing it as a snake threaded through a turtle, leaving many to believe that it could be a prehistoric dinosaur of some sort.

The plesiosaur is a marine reptile that lived 160 million years ago. It sported long neck - in many cases as long as its body and tail combined. Scientists have pondered over the why an animal would need such a long neck.. Leslie Noè of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, UK has an answer.

Plesiosaurs, he says, used their long necks to reach down and feed on soft-bodied animals living on the sea floor. During a vertebrate paleontology meeting in Canada last month, Noè examined the fossils of a plesiosaur called Muraenosaurus.

Calculating the articulation of the neck bones, he concluded the neck was flexible and could move easily when pointing down. He explained how the neck was like a feeding tube, to collect soft-bodied prey: The small skulls of plesiosaurs couldn't cope with hard-shelled prey.

However, the osteology of the neck makes it absolutely certain that the plesiosaur could not lift its head out of the water - as most alleged pictures of Nessie show.

Sadly Noè ruled-out the plesiosaur as a candidate for the Loch Ness monster.