In 1933, Londoner George Spicer was driving around Loch Ness when he claimed to have seen “the most extraordinary form of animal” cross in front of his car.

In 1934, a photo taken by Robert Kenneth Wilson, a London gynaecologist, was published in the Daily Mail showing what appeared to be the head and neck of the creature.

You can see that image above, and it came to be one of the most famous pictures ever of the fabled creature.

The Loch Ness Monster since became a thing of legend and has attracted Nessie seekers from around the world since the 1930s.

Now researchers at the University of St Andrews think they have discovered why myths of long-necked creatures like ‘Nessie’ have rocketed in recent centuries, and Georgian fossil hunters appear to be to blame, reports the Telegraph.

The academics found that after the first dinosaurs were discovered by paleontologists, and put on display at museums across Britain in the early 19th century, the number of reports of spindly-necked terrors soared.

Although stories of sea creatures date back through history, before 1800 just 10 per cent of cases described animals with a long neck. But by the 1930s, when Spicer saw his ‘monster’ the number was close to 50 per cent.

In other words, a kind of ‘collective delusion’ gripped national consciousness to such an extent that an unidentified shape in the water was immediately attributed to dinosaurs.

Cryptozoologists even suggested that the Loch Ness Monster could be plesiosaur, an ancient marine reptile. They claimed the creature could have survived the comet strike which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and made its way the safety of the deep loch. The first complete plesiosaur was found in 1823 by Lyme Regis fossil hunter Mary Anning.

Dr Charles Paxton, a statistician at St Andrews, claims that the discovery of long-necked marine reptiles in the 19th century influenced how people interpreted what they saw in the water.

“The problem is an interesting fusion of history and palaeontology which shows that statistics can be used to rigorously test all sorts of strange hypotheses, if the data is handled in the right way.”

…The researchers looked through 1,688 historical reports, including books, newspaper accounts, and first-hand testimonies going back hundreds of years, of 1,543 sightings omitting obvious hoaxes.

It included a peak between 1930 and 1934 of reports around the world following publicity associated Spicer’s sighting of the Loch Ness monster in 1933 and a photograph taken by Hugh Gray in the same year.

Bad news for Nessie Truthers – and perhaps the Scottish tourism industry.

[source:telegraph]