I thought that BP had decided to drill there.
Come on. The idea of there being a dinosaur in Loch Ness is ridiculous. No one would believe that.
Everyone knows Nessy is a Plesiosaur!!
Ahem.
If you have a whole lot of money and a big bucket of water, it’s now possible to sequence whatever DNA is in there, known or unknown, and compare the large unknown sequences to databases of all the known critters that have been sequenced. So you could get an unknown eukaryote or even an unknown chordate, in theory, and be all “Eureka! The monster! Or a new…mudpuppy…or something…”
Isn’t Nessie working as a door greater at Mr. Burn’s casino these days?
I guess the real question is: When we prove the LNM doesn’t exist will that mean we’ve killed it?
Oh, that’s just like you, Scylla, getting all concerned about the health of mythical water-monsters. Where were you when it was the aliens under attack, or the sasquaches?
I attended an evalingcial Christian camp one year as a teen. They claimed that the existance of the Loch Ness Monster disproved evolution.
But surely everyone knows that the LNM is a product of Zygon days? 
Exactly - who needs all this DNA flimflammery.
Just blow your thistle whistle and up she’ll pop!
But so does the fact that we still have monkeys and apes.
Wasn’t the LNS disproven a few decades ago by sweeping the entire loch with sonor?
No, the crack Emergency Response Unit of the Highlands and Islands Tourist Board successfully debunked those “findings”.
It has stealth capability.
I think most rational people don’t believe in the LNM. However, I gotta tell ya’ I looked and looked at the Loch when I visited, just hoping to catch a glimpse of something, anything.
I bet everyone here would too.
You’d be amazed at how many people you could get to believe anything.
Anyway, no. Once you enter the sort of mindset that makes you totally convinced there’s a loch ness monster (or vaccines cause autism or the moon landing was faked or whatever) then there’s no evidence you’re willing to accept that you are wrong. You have unshakable faith in the idea and any evidence against your idea either gets explained away with special pleading or it actually gets integrated into your belief in the form of a conspiracy theory. “Aha, the CDC has released a conclusive study indicating no correlation between autism and vaccination… BECAUSE THEY’RE IN ON THE CONSPIRACY! MORE PROOF!”
There’s nothing we could do to disprove the loch ness monster. Even if we drained the whole lake someone would just say they used the teleportation technology the aliens gave them 6000 years ago to teleport to the planet gofnarg.
First, they came for the sasquatches and I said nothing because I wasn’t a sasquatch
Then they came for the greys and I said nothing because I wasn’t an alien…
There are a few deeply eccentric people who live on the banks of the Loch, maintaining an endless watch, but otherwise it’s very much a tongue in cheek thing. It’s a nice part of the world even without monsters, and the tourist centres provide a vital outlet for the wares of the hard-pressed tartan-tat factories of South-east Asia.
Geek Joke
Bah, every Scientist knows that the Conventions voted Nessie out of the Consensus decades ago!
I wouldn’t mind visiting Loch Ness, just so I could say I did. (And I would totally lie to my friends and tell them I saw Nessie). I’ve always wanted to visit Scotland, anyways.
Plus, I’d love to see Urquhart Castle.
Absolutely.
It would be so cool if the LNM existed (although, it doesn’t), and you may as well look while you’re there.
The surprising thing about all this, for me, is how famous Nessie apparently is. And all it took was a couple of really crap, easily-explained, photos.