Sir that’s a dragon.
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
277 points (99.6% liked)
News
23409 readers
2670 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
20-40 ft long. Would have been epic to see one alive. Tho’ possibly also relatively brief.
Up to 70 feet according to the BBC article.
"He's a big boy"
~ Steve Irwin
I wonder how many other skulls like this protruded from the cliffs, terrorizing seafarers of days gone by? Another possible contribution to our tales of the sea perhaps?
What an amazing find.
Lewis and Clark saw some serious shit on their trip across the US and back. It would have been something to see a 70-foot-long fish fossil in the middle of what is now Kansas, while having no clue how that was even possible.
It went extinct 150 million years ago so I don't think it can have possibly bothered mariners of the past.
Imagine that thing swimming toward you with its mouth open
Any dinosaur sea creature swimming towards me would make the water around me brown
Learning from the noble squid, I see.
You need to meet with your Dr or change your diet.
Some people are into that. Not me. Some people tho
Do it for science
It's hard to believe how well it's preserved. They're never this complete! It sounds like they might look for the rest of the skeleton, which will be exposed and lost to erosion anyway if it is there. If we're lucky, we'll also find clues about its eating habits, which isn't out of the realm of probability considering how intact they found the skull. Truly remarkable, I really want to see that upcoming Attenborough documentary.
It's wild to think about how many incredible fossils are out there right now, buried deep and not currently in a place that is being eroded so that we happen to stumble on them during our incredibly tiny slice of geological time.
Eating habits. Anything it wants to eat.
A speedboat style crocodile, fuck everything about it. And it can climb mountains? Nope!
Steve Etches will put the skull on display next year at his museum in Kimmeridge - the Etches Collection.
I love that they’re going to display this in the local museum!
Leviathan?
Behemoth.
Wasn’t Behemoth a land animal?
So if these marine reptiles could exist off Dorset's Coast, could there be such a creature living still in Loch Ness? The one photo that has become famous sure looks like this kind of a creature. Or could it even survive in a closed lake system? Just pondering - this is an awesome discovery!
For a loch ness monster type creature to exist it would truly need to be supernatural.
If there were only one it would need to be practically ageless and have survived since these creatures roamed the earth millions of years ago.
Otherwise you'll have to have at least two creatures in Loch Ness for the entire time to maintain a lineage throughout that time, making it twice as likely to have been discovered
If you follow the rules of genetics the creature would likely be horribly deformed and riddled with genetic diseases if that were the case.
To avoid that you would probably need a population of 50-100 creatures within the loch ness in order to sustain a somewhat viable population.
It's very unlikely that with how much attention has gone on, 50-100+ of those creatures would go undiscovered, let alone the sustenance needed to sustain that size of population.
So no, unless it's a single supernatural creature it's pretty much impossible I would say.
So you're telling me there's a chance.
We're finding more and more bizarre sea creatures in the ocean depths all the time. The thing is, the ocean's environment (until recently) hasn't changed that much over millions of years. So a prehistoric creature COULD theoretically still exist without having to evolve much at all down there.
Look at the Coelecanth....scientists really believed it was extinct for millions of years, and then a live specimen was caught by African Shark hunters not too long ago. And that thing really LOOKS primitive. I saw the specimin in a preservation tank at a museum in San Francisco, and it was jaw-dropping. I've never seen a creature that primitive, with hairy fins and scales the size of dinner plates. It was truly awesome and kind of scary.
So it's healthy to be skeptical but also I think it's important to be a little unsure and open minded.
Oh yeah I realize that, I mean I'm not saying I truly believe (or do I) that there is such a thing as a Loch Ness creature. I guess I'd have to be nuts to believe there could by cryptozoological oddities out there like a Mothman or a Yeti.
I guess I would pull a Mulder and say, "I want to believe." Or do I. I've been in places where I've seen some things I couldn't and wouldn't ever try to explain. And I know others wouldn't believe it anyway. Until it happens to you, and you see it yourself, you can't believe such things could exist....
But it's the same way with Santa, if you think about it. I believe it because, I want to believe. And I get what you're saying about population probability - if one such creature exists, others like it must also exist (and we'd probably have more proof by now).
I mean, if it's too big to swim out of the Dochgarrot lock then it'd be easy to detect. If it isn't then what's keeping it in the lake instead of swimming out past Inverness and out into the Moray Firth?
It doesn't like Inverness it made the mistake of walking though the Ferry. After that straight back to the lock and never to the big city again. Plus it found Inverness Castle not that interesting.