The Loch Ness Plesiosaur Fossil

Loch Ness is young. It has held water for only about 10,000 to 12,000 years. Plesiosaurs vanished long before that. Yet the animal has never left the loch's legend. As Lyall Anderson of the National Museum of Scotland put it, "The plesiosaur is the image people have of the Loch Ness Monster."

2 July 2003. Gerald McSorley, a 67-year-old retired scrap merchant from Stirling, was in shallow water at Loch Ness. "I literally tripped over the fossil in the water," he said. He cleaned off about an inch of green algae. Beneath it he saw the texture of bone. He knew it was important. A Dutch tourist who knew his fossils was there with him.

The stone held four perfectly preserved vertebrae, set in grey limestone. Accounts differ on the exact spot. Some place it in the loch itself, others on the shore. One account puts it below a lay-by on the A82.

The specimen went to the National Museum of Scotland. Lyall Anderson confirmed a plesiosaur, about 150 million years old. "Professional palaeontologists go out looking for things like this and usually find nothing," he said. "Mr McSorley is to be congratulated on a very good find."

On 16 July 2003 The Telegraph ran the story. Museum scientists, it reported, linked the bones to a 35-foot "monster" that once lived there. For a moment, Nessie had a spine.

Then the rock began to tell its own story. The limestone was not the kind found near Loch Ness. The bone was riddled with holes made by burrowing sponges. Creatures of the sea. Matt Dale of Mr Wood's Fossils in Edinburgh pointed to the sea-worn look and the borings. Museum staff thought it unlikely the stone had arrived naturally as a glacial erratic.

Richard Forrest of the Plesiosaur Directory studied the press photographs. He saw "heavily water-worn" vertebrae, printed upside-down. Museum spokeswoman Hannah Dolby allowed that the fossil might have been planted. Gary Campbell of the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club agreed it "could also have been planted." The Loch Ness Project, whose Adrian Shine is reported to have examined the find, is said to have concluded it was "placed at the lay-by in order to be found."

The verdict that stuck was a hoax. Forrest noted that such fossils can be bought for "a couple of hundred pounds," making it "a rather expensive, and very shallow, deception." He offered a gentler idea too. Perhaps it was a demonstration piece for tour groups, left behind by accident. Its likely origin was a beach pebble from a Jurassic outcrop such as the Moray Firth coast. Forrest was clear there was "no suggestion" McSorley knew of any deception.

Not everyone was convinced. Jordan P. Niednagel of TrueAuthority called a plant "quite improbable." Plesiosaur fossils are rare and costly, he argued, and the algae pointed to long immersion.

The fossil surfaced in the same month as a BBC sonar survey of the loch. In 2010 Michael Newton, writing on the Centre for Fortean Zoology blog, linked the two as attempts to "bury Nessie." He called the fossil "another drop-off by unknown hoaxers." Today it sits among the Loch Ness Monster hoaxes at the Museum of Hoaxes and on Wikipedia. The planter, if there was one, has never been named.