According to legend, One Thousand, Four Hundred and Fifty years ago today, Saint Columba, an irish abbot, supposedly banished a ferocious, unidentified, water beast to the depths of the River Ness after it had killed a Pict and then tried to attack Columba’s disciple. This unidentified water beast has been equated with the Loch Ness Monster, affectionately known by the locals as Nessie.
Many believers speculate that Nessie was a plesiosaur, which, if it had a metabolism similar to modern reptiles, could allow it to live for hundreds of years. (Of course, considering how long dinosaurs have supposedly* been extinct, it’s hard to know how long they could have lived.)
So maybe we should be saying, Happy Birthday Nessie VII!
* Cryptozoologists have found evidence that certain dinosaur species may have survived in remote places of the planet where the climate has not changed in tens of millions of years up until recent times, at least until the time of the middle Egyptians in one case and until the time of the Aztecs in another. As this is not a blog on cryptozoology, we won’t discuss such evidence here but encourage you to do your own research if interested.