Oh, so plesiosaurs could be freshwater after all? NOT TOO SURPRISING! {g}

Started by JasonPratt, July 28, 2022, 08:35:35 AM

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JasonPratt

https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/animals/scientists-say-new-fossils-point-to-existence-of-loch-ness-monster/vi-AA104296?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=b3d367309307449289d0a40e17b52763&category=foryou

That doesn't mean the Loch Ness Monster has to be a relic plesiosaur (family) of course, or even one highly evolved in the umpteen million years since standard plesis got into the fossil record. (Or even an animal at all.) But the objection that the (handful of) plesi fossils found so far have all been salt-water, therefore the LNM (or other lake monsters) couldn't be that species, has always been silly to me.
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Sir Slash

I agree. If the animal didn't have gills to breath with, why would it need to be in salt water only?
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JasonPratt

Quote from: Sir Slash on July 28, 2022, 09:45:31 AM
I agree. If the animal didn't have gills to breath with, why would it need to be in salt water only?

I'm sure that has something to do with what's necessary for it to filter out the excess salt from its drinking water. (Plus incidental water picked up from eating in the water.) A few sharks can go both ways on that, like the infamous bull sharks (who have the all-time record of human fatalities thanks to infesting the Ganges River in India.) Some other kind of shark (Greenland?? -- that doesn't seem right, but it's like that name) can do the same thing to live in the swamps of Florida, although the water there isn't entirely 'fresh'.

More relevant would be air breathers of course, like snakes, crocs, some sea-going mammals. Not sure of the extent of the list, but air-breathers would have one less problem adapting to salt vs fresh; but unless they have an internal system for dealing with drinking and other incidental water ingestion, they can't live in both biome types. Most pertinently as an example, humans can't live in salt drinking water. (We'd have problems dealing with excess contact-amounts of fresh water, too.)

In the case of plesiosaurs (for example), I'm not sure we're in any position from fossil remains to infer that any subspecies could live in both biomes, or whether multiple subspecies were only adapted to one instead of the other. (Though evolutionarily there would have to be transitional forms capable of existing in both biomes of course, even if as a practical matter they never did so; for example a population living in a salt water environment that slowly transitioned to a fresh water environment, wouldn't necessarily be moving back and forth to more and less salty water areas.)

In the case of Loch Ness specifically, along with some other proposed lake monsters (Champ comes to mind, with river access to salt water areas -- the town of Magog Canada, where my Dad's family emigrated from, has a tradition of a monster living in the river connecting Champlain with the St. Lawrence seaway), multi-biome capability would solve a number of problems related to a population surviving in the Loch, IF there are deeper connections to the ocean than the Ness River which seems way too small for such transitioning.

But then, the 'monster' could also be a giant eel species, perhaps. (An unexpected amount of eel DNA was famously detected in the lake within the past few years.) Or a relic giant seal population from the relatively much more recent era of giant mammals. (There's a ton of interesting folk-anthropological data pointing to large saltwater seals with ridiculously long necks and tails living up into the early 20th century in oceans around the world.)
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JasonPratt

Yeah the marine naturalist from the late 19th century who tallied up his report and concluded "giant prehistoric seal", specialized in seals, so he made references to leopard seals and other related mammals sometimes for example.

Though in this case we're talking about convergent evolutionary processes (as we'd call them today) independently producing a seal with proportions like the previously produced Elasmosaur: a neck 50 feet long to the head, tail just as long, relatively small body for the flippers/fins.

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ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!