Scientist Finds ‘Surprising’ Results After Testing DNA From Loch Ness Waters

The Loch Ness is viewed in March 2012. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

A scientific study of the Loch Ness in Scotland has found that its famed monster, Nessie, “might” be real, according to reports.

The leader of the team from New Zealand’s University of Otago, Professor Neil Gemmell, said they took a number of water samples, which contained DNA from the animals that have lived in the Loch Ness.

“We’ve tested each one of the main monster hypotheses and three of them we can probably say aren’t right and one might be,” said Gemmell. The results were “surprising,” he told Yahoo UK.

The professor said he is hoping to announce his team’s full findings next month.

He told Yahoo UK, “Is there anything deeply mysterious? It depends what you believe. Is there anything startling? There are a few things that are a bit surprising. What we'll have achieved is what we set out to do, which is document the biodiversity of Loch Ness in June 2018 in some level of detail.”

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He also told iNews that his team will “never disprove that there’s a monster, as we said at the beginning.”

Loch Ness, Scotland Google Maps

The iNews report noted that the team has found about 15 different species of fish and 3,000 species of bacteria.

The Loch Ness contains more water than all of the lakes in Wales and England combined, making it one of the United Kingdom’s deepest lakes. Meaning, there is a lot of space to roam around in there.

According to the BBC, the waters of the Loch Ness are also quite dark due to containing peat from the soil around the lake.

Artist's drawing of the Loch Ness Monster. Shutterstock*

There have been debates for decades as to whether the monster actually exists. In the 6th century, the very first sighting of the legendary creature was reported when St. Columbia “gave an order to one of his monks to swim across the lake to get a boat,” reported the Vintage News. The Irish saint then told the monster to not attack the monk, and it complied.

So far in 2019, there have been six alleged Nessie sightings in the Loch Ness, reported the Daily Mail.

“These are all very credible sightings,” Gary Campbell, who maintains the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, told the Daily Mail. “Do these latest sightings explain the Loch Ness mystery? No. Do they add to the weight of evidence that there is something happening that is unexplained? Yes.”

He didn’t provide any other details.

Fueled by Dinosaur Hysteria?

A study from the History of Earth Sciences Society published in April suggests that 19th-century reports of the Loch Ness monster might have been influenced by the discovery of dinosaur fossils, according to the study’s abstract.

Urquhart Castle which sits on the banks of Loch Ness, has been voted one of Britain's favourite tourist spots, on September 11, 2008 in Urquhart, Scotland. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

“Over the last 200 years, there is indeed evidence of a decline in serpentiform sea serpent reports and an increase in the proportion of reports with necks but there is no evidence for an increase in the proportion of mosasaur-like reports,” the abstract of the study reads. “However, witnesses only began to unequivocally compare sea serpents to prehistoric reptiles in the late nineteenth century, some fifty years after the suggestion was first made by naturalists.”

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“After Mesozoic reptiles became well-known, reports of sea serpents, which until then had tended towards the serpentine, began to describe the monster as more and more resembling a Mesozoic marine reptile like a plesiosaur or a mosasaur,” according to the abstract. Plesiosaurs are a type of marine reptile with a long neck.