PLAUSIBLE PLESIOSAURS?
A considerable stir was caused by recent reports that the existence of a Loch Ness Monster had been described as “plausible” by scientists. In what may well be a case of a university’s press office taking a sober academic paper and extrapolating rather more than it warranted, this claim was based on the discovery of fossils of small plesiosaurs found in the remains of a 100-millionyear-old river system in the Kem Kem beds of Morocco by researchers from the University of Bath, University of Portsmouth, and Université Hassan II. The discovery of the remains of multiple plesiosaurs there suggests that some species could live in fresh water at least part of the time, not
