No-one has addressed this part of the OP yet, so maybe I should have a try. There have been many ‘long-necked sea-monster’ carcasses recovered from the sea or stranded on the shore; often they are tentatively identified as a ‘plesiosaur’ or ‘sea-serpent’ but when examined by experts they turn out to be decayed sharks or cetaceans. The gills or flesh around the neck rot away or are eaten by scavengers, leaving just the backbone and the skull on what appears to be a long neck.
You dont have to travel to Scotland to look for pleisaurs. check out the following ones right here in the USA:
Norman
From N. Carolina which is even more weird because lake Norman is man made. But this one is also interesting because sometimes radioactive waste has gotten released into the lake which might have created…
Champ
From New York. HERE is a wiki of all “lake monsters”.
As many things there are that are ridiculous about the OPs post I have to play devil’s advocate.
To everyone who’s stating millions of years of extinction, I present ;
The Coelacanth
Thought to be extinct for 66 million years before it’s discovery in 1938.
Since then, many populations have been found around the world.
Id still give a North Atlantic pod of plesiosaurs an extremely low likelyhood but the long extinct argument certainly is no deal breaker.
Actually there are lots of salmon, eel, pike, trout, and perhaps even sturgeon, and a big sturgeon could account for a sober “what the hell was *that *big thing I saw in the water?!” tale. They can get 20 feet long.
Re-read post #5. Their is huge, HUGE difference between a deep water fish that gets up a respectable 6’/200 lbs and a 40’ air-breathing apex predator. The first can go undiscovered for a long, long time due to habitat and habit. The second, not so much.
You and APB ninja’d me. I was going to mention the same thing. If anyone wants a factual cite, I think Daniel Cohen mentioned this in his old book A Modern Look at Monsters.
We, as modern educated humans, do have an annoying habit of discounting reports from centuries ago with handwaving and much scoffing. That’s why movie ‘tidal’ waves don’t look like a tide at all, but real tidal waves do look like a tide coming in, but we couldn’t reconcile a ‘tidal’ as being able to cause the damage reported, so we invented massive tall waves, in direct contravention to what the ancients’ reported. Because we know better, right?
The answer is probably no. One issue is whether the encounter happened at all. Adomnán in his Vita Columbae might, you know, have been making stuff up. This was just the sort of story that hagiographies were expected to contain. So one doesn’t necessarily even need to suppose that there was any earlier local tradition.
But perhaps more importantly, the Vita Columbae contains dozens of stories of Columba’s miracles. Added to which there were lots of relics and other sites associated with Columba. So although a widespread cult did develop around his memory, there were plenty of other places for his devotees to focus on. The River Ness story only began to attract attention once it was linked to Nessie in the twentieth century.