National Geographic Tales of the Weird

by David Braun

  PHONY FOSSIL

  Loch Ness Sea Monster

  Fossil a Fake, Say Scientists

  When the remains of a giant sea creature were discovered in Scotland’s Loch Ness, the world went wild. But why were scientists so skeptical? Is it all just a hoax?

  Along the shores of Loch Ness, Scotland, the discovery of fossilized remains surprised and delighted fans of the world’s most famous monster. Could they belong to the Loch Ness Monster? Many people believe “Nessie” to be alive and well, if rather shy, having sought refuge in Scotland’s largest freshwater loch. Of course, there are still plenty of skeptics who believe there is no Nessie—alive or dead. Could these four fossilized vertebrae, complete with blood vessels and spinal column, be the sort of thing that could convince them?

  Gerald McSorely holds up the fossil he found on the shores of Loch Ness. (Photo Credit 5.16)

  First News of Nessie

  The Loch Ness Monster legend is said to date back more than 1,400 years, when Saint Columba encountered a strange water beast in the region. But it kept a low profile until 1933, when a new road made the loch more accessible and gave clear views from its northern shore. A flood of reported sightings soon followed, the first coming from an innkeeper at Drumnadrochit.

  That same year saw the publication of the most famous picture of Nessie—its neck and head rising from the loch’s murky waters. Taken by a respected gynecologist, Colonel Robert Wilson, the monster became an overnight sensation.

  But in 1994 Wilson’s photograph made the front pages again—when exposed as one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century. Christian Spurling confessed shortly before his death that the grainy, black-and-white image actually showed a piece of plastic attached to a toy submarine. Spurling made the model for his stepfather, Marmaduke Wetherall, who, along with Wilson, wanted something to show for their monster hunting expedition.

  It seems the hoaxers have been trying to match their success ever since.

  TRUTH:

  THE LIFE OF GARY CAMPBELL, PRESIDENT OF THE OFFICIAL LOCH NESS MONSTER FAN CLUB, IS INSURED AGAINST HIM BEING EATEN ALIVE BY THE MONSTER, TO THE SUM OF £250,000 (U.S. $400,000).

  Dem Bones

  But were the bones found in 2003 part of a hoax? Retired scrap metal dealer Gerald McSorley, from Stirling in Scotland, found the remains. The pensioner said he chanced upon it when he tripped and fell in the loch. He told the world: “I have always believed in the Loch Ness Monster, but this proves it for me. The resemblance between this and the sightings which have been made are so similar.”

  His discovery was confirmed by staff at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Paleontologists determined that the fossilized bones did belong to a plesiosaur, a fearsome predator that ruled the seas between 200 and 65 million years ago. Measuring 35 feet (11 meters) head to tail, with a long, serpentine neck, the reptile eventually died out with the dinosaurs. Yet they still had their doubts.

  Other Lakes, Other Monsters

  Loch Ness isn’t the only place that’s home to a legendary lake creature. These other places around the world have monsters of their own:

  1. “Wally” Wallowa Lake, Oregon, U.S.A.

  2. “Ogopogo” Okanagan Lake, British Columbia, Canada

  3. “Manipogo” Lake Manitoba, Manitoba, Canada

  4. “Cressie” Crescent Lake, Newfoundland, Canada

  5. “Hamlet” Lade Elsinore, California, U.S.A.

  6. “Tahoe Tessie” Lake Tahoe, California, U.S.A.

  7. “Champ” Lake Champlain, New York/Vermont, U.S.A.

  8. “Auli” Lake Chad, Chad, Africa

  9. “Chipekwe” Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania, Africa

  10. “Morag” Loch Morar, Scotland, U.K.

  11. “Brosno Dragon” Brosno Lake, Andreapol, Russia

  12. “Issie” Lake Ikeda, Kagoshima, Japan

  Planted Evidence?

  Lyall Anderson, one of the museum’s paleontologists, said: “The fossil is definitely that of a plesiosaur—a very good example. And I believe Mr. McSorley when he says he found it where he did. But there’s evidence to suggest it came from elsewhere and had been planted.

  “The fossil is embedded in a gray Jurassic-aged limestone. Rocks in the Loch Ness area are much older—they’re all crystalline, igneous, and metamorphic rocks.” Anderson says the nearest match for this limestone is at Eathie on the Black Isle, some 30 miles (50 kilometers) northeast of Loch Ness. He added: “The stone has been intensely drilled by marine organisms. It seems likely the specimen was on a seashore until relatively recently.”

  Sea Monster

  Others agree with Anderson. Richard Forrest, a plesiosaurus expert at the New Walk Museum in Leicester, England, said: “The fossil’s general appearance, and the presence of holes made by burrowing sponges, shows it has spent some time in the sea, probably [with] beach pebble[s]. Yet Loch Ness contains freshwater.”

  Gary Campbell, president of the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club, added: “I think it’s almost certain the fossil was placed there deliberately. There are very few public access points to the shore and the fossil was found by a layby where lots of tourists stop. As far as we’re concerned it was left for someone to find.”

  Campbell says numerous other Nessie-inspired hoaxes have taken place in this area. Recently conger eels were dumped in the loch after being caught by sea fishermen, presumably in the hope they would be mistaken for miniature monsters. One measured more than 6 feet (2 meters) long.

  However, Forrest says there could also be an innocent reason why the fossil turned up here. He said: “A plesiosaur limb bone was found near the same spot some years ago. It turned out it belonged to a local tour operator, who used the fossil as a demonstration piece. He’d left it on a rock and forgot about it.”

  Probably Not a Plesiosaur

  With Nessie’s true likeness still shrouded in mystery, Anderson says the plesiosaur is the creature that most commonly springs to mind, adding: “It’s an image many people are familiar with and they often try to pin it on the Loch Ness Monster.” But paleontologists say this is wishful thinking. While plesiosaurs died out many millions of years ago, Loch Ness is less than 12,000 years old, having been glacially excavated during the last ice age.

  Forrest also adds that plesiosaurs, being cold-blooded reptiles, wouldn’t generate enough internal body heat to survive the loch’s cool temperatures. And even if they could, there wouldn’t be enough food for them to survive.

  Plus, plesiosaurs breathed air and would need to surface several times a day, at the very least. “Despite this, I haven’t heard of any sightings that sound anything like a plesiosaur,” Forrest said. “People usually refer to a series of undulating humps. The plesiosaur, being a reptile, wouldn’t undulate but move from side to side. Such sightings are much more likely to come from mammals—such as a row of otters swimming across the loch.”

  Forrest concludes: “My own view is that reports of the Loch Ness Monster are very good for the Scottish tourist industry, but not backed up by any real evidence. One thing is for sure: Even if there is a large animal in Loch Ness, it’s not a plesiosaur.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Feathered Friends

  (Photo Credit 6.1)

  There’s a lot more to birds than just colorful feathers and beautiful songs. Beneath their ordinary exteriors lurk creatures that are unexpectedly weird, like the half-male, half-female chicken and the bird that sings through its feathers. There are smiling birds and smelly birds. There are birds that fly as high as airplanes and others that are as intelligent as humans. So don’t underestimate the birds; they’re a whole lot weirder than meets the eye.

  FLY AWAY HOME

  Highest Flying Bird Found

  The bar-headed goose can reach nearly 21,120 feet and fly over the Himalaya in just about eight hours, a new study shows.

  The world’s highest flying bird is an Asian goose that can fly up and over the Himalaya in only about eight hours, a new study finds. The bar-he
aded goose is “very pretty, but I guess it doesn’t look like a super-athlete,” said study co-author Lucy Hawkes, a biologist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom.

  A Little Traveling Music, Please

  In 2009, Hawkes and an international team of researchers tagged 25 bar-headed geese in India with GPS transmitters. Shortly thereafter, the birds left on their annual spring migration to Mongolia and surrounding areas to breed.

  To get there, the geese have to fly over the Himalaya—the world’s tallest mountain range and home to the tallest mountain on Earth, Mount Everest, which rises to 29,035 feet (8,850 meters). The researchers found that the birds reached a peak height of nearly 21,120 feet (6,437 meters) during their travels. The migration took about two months and covered distances as long as 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers).

  The birds made frequent rest stops during the migration, but they appear to have flown over the Himalayan portion of their journey in a single effort that took about eight hours on average and included little or no rest. A similar intense climb could kill a human without proper acclimatization, Hawkes said.

  “If you’ve ever seen a goose sitting on a lake, take-off is quite an energetic thing, so it may be [energetically] cheaper to keep going than to keep sitting down and taking off again—and they may not want to delay getting over the mountains,” Hawkes said.

  TRUTH:

  BAR-HEADED GEESE HAVE A SPECIAL TYPE OF HEMOGLOBIN THAT ABSORBS OXYGEN MORE QUICKLY THAN THAT OF OTHER BIRDS, SO THEY CAN EXTRACT MORE OXYGEN FROM EACH BREATH.

  A Bod Built for Flight

  Even more impressive, the birds completed the ascent under their own muscular power, with almost no aid from tail winds or updrafts. “Most other species that we’ve identified as high-altitude flyers usually get there by soaring and gliding up,” said study leader Charles Bishop, also a biologist at Bangor University.

  By contrast, the bar-headed goose reaches such lofty heights by flapping vigorously, if not gracefully. “Geese tend to honk a lot as they fly,” co-author Hawkes said. “We don’t think of them as the most elegant of migrants.”

  The birds have evolved numerous physiological adaptations—many of which are not so obvious—to help them complete their migrations. “They have all these internal morphological tweaks that make it possible,” Bishop said. For example, past studies have shown that the geese have more capillaries and more efficient red blood cells than other birds, meaning their bodies can deliver more oxygen to muscle cells faster.

  Bar-headed geese can fly over the Himalaya in eight hours. (Photo Credit 6.2)

  The geese’s flight muscles also have more mitochondria—energy-producing structures inside cells—than their fellow fowl. Another trick in the birds’ arsenal: hyperventilation. Unlike humans, bar-headed geese can breathe in and out very rapidly without getting dizzy or passing out. “By hyperventilating, [the birds] increase the net quantity of oxygen that they get into their blood,” Hawkes explained.

  “We will never be able to engineer a human lung to work like a bird lung. But with more information we might be able to develop drugs that would help duplicate some of their cellular responses.”

  Frank Powell

  professor of medicine and director of the University of California’s White Mountain Research Station

  Older Than the Hills

  Before the new study, many scientists had thought the geese were taking advantage of daytime winds that blow up and over mountaintops. But the team showed the birds forgo the winds and choose to fly at night, when conditions are relatively calmer.

  “They’re potentially avoiding higher winds in the afternoon, which might make flights more uncomfortable or more risky,” said Bishop. The birds could potentially head east or west and fly around, rather than over, the mountain range, but this would add several days to their trip and would actually use up more energy.

  “I guess it’s like when you’re trying to get in the grocery store and there’s a steep set of stairs and a really long [wheelchair] route. You have to work out which one you can be bothered to do on a particular day,” Hawkes said.

  Another hypothesis about why the geese choose to fly over rather than around the Himalaya is that the birds have been doing so for millions of years—long before the mountains reached their current heights. “Geese are a relatively old group of birds, and it’s possible that when bar-heads first evolved as a species, the mountains weren’t nearly as high as they are today,” Hawkes said.

  P.U., I SMELL YOU

  Body Odor

  Attracting Predators to Birds

  New Zealand’s native-bird B.O. is so pungent, it’s alerting predators to the birds’ presence, ongoing research shows.

  At best, body odor is offensive, but at its worst, it can be deadly. New Zealand’s native bird populations are being threatened, and scientists believe their pungent smell may be exposing them to alien predators. The smells may drive some species to extinction, unless conservationists take unorthodox measures, such as adding “deodorant” to bird nests, according to biologist Jim Briskie of Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand.

  TRUTH:

  THERE ARE ONLY ABOUT 62 KAKAPO PARROTS LEFT IN THE WORLD.

  Bird Smell Source

  Many bird scents stem from a gland that produces waxes essential to keeping feathers healthy. In Europe and the Americas, birds’ bodies alter this preening wax during breeding season, changing the wax’s composition to reduce smells and keep the birds’ nests less detectable by predators that use their noses to find food.

  In a recent experiment in New Zealand, Briskie compared waxes from six native species, such as robins and warblers, with waxes from invasive species, such as blackbirds and sparrows, which had evolved in Europe until the 1870s.

  “The European birds in New Zealand changed their preen waxes to become less smelly in the breeding season,” he said. “But native birds did not, and they remained more smelly overall,” Briskie said.

  For instance, native kiwis—flightless, chicken-size birds—smell like ammonia, and kakapo parrots, also flightless, smell like “musty violin cases,” he said. Other New Zealand species seem to have similarly distinctive scents, Briskie said, unlike most birds on other continents.

  The kakapo parrot’s strong body odor may be life threatening. (Photo Credit 6.3)

  “We do know that it’s easy for muzzled dogs to find kakapo and kiwi by their smell, so I suspect that predators like rats or feral cats might be able to easily find native birds also,” Briskie said.

  Alien Predators on the Scent

  New Zealand’s birds may be so pungent largely because they were able to get away with it for so many centuries, Briskie suspects. When New Zealand split away from Australia some 80 million years ago, no predatory mammals came along for the ride, so native birds never had to evolve means of masking their scents to survive, he said.

  But eventually humans changed the landscape. The native Maori people introduced the Polynesian rat, and Europeans later unleashed other rat species, domestic cats, and the stoat—a type of weasel—which have easily caught on to the birds’ scents.

  TRUTH:

  KIWI BIRDS ARE THE SIZE OF CHICKENS BUT LAY EGGS THE SIZE OF OSTRICH EGGS.

  Partly as a result, some 43 native birds have already gone extinct, Briskie said. Seventy-three other native species, many of them flightless, are listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

  The Smell of Love

  Bird experts have long denied the importance of smell in birds’ communication patterns, focusing more on birdsongs and flashy plumage. However, a recent study on the crested auklet shows that smell may be as important to birds as to other animals. The Alaskan seabird produces a strong tangerine-like smell, which scientists associate with courtship displays. The fragrance may act as a type of sexual ornament, since crested auklets already display other traits such as bright beaks that are used to attract mates or show status. The strength of a bird’s s
mell may indicate quality to a mate, although this theory requires further research.

  Deodorant for Birds

  One solution could be to give deodorant to the odorous birds, Briskie said. “If we prove that this is a problem, we might be able to envision some kind of odor-eater or deodorant we could put into the nest to absorb some of those odors and protect them more effectively,” Briskie said.

  But there’s a potential downside—the birds’ stench may serve other purposes. Bird deodorant “would only be useful as long as we knew it didn’t interfere with the way those odors might be used in communication with mates or offspring,” Briskie explained.

  In addition, bird B.O. might also be used to turn the tables on predators. “It could be another way of building a better mousetrap to catch [invasive] rats or stoats,” Briskie said. “Perhaps instead of controversial poisons, we might come up with long-lasting baits using essence of kiwi or kakapo that lure predators into a trap.”

  CHICKEN RIDDLE SOLVED

  Half-Male, Half-Female Chicken

  Call them “hoosters” or call them “rens,” but scientists have finally discovered the reason why some chickens are half male and half female.

  It was a tough egg to crack, but scientists have finally explained why some chickens are born half male and half female. The bodies of these hen-rooster hybrids, or gynandromorphs, have a mixture of genetically male and female cells, the research reveals.