Loch Ness monster a paddling elephant?

Paleontologist and painter Neil Clark is dampening the hopes of Nessie believers around the world when he says the monster was perhaps a swimming pachyderm.

Clark noticed similarities in the hump-and-trunk silhouettes of swimming Indian elephants and the serpentine shapes of 1930s Nessie descriptions and photographs, such as the famous 1934 image shown as an inset above.

Why would an elephant be swimming in a chilly Scottish lake? "The reason why we see elephants in Loch Ness is that circuses used to go along the road to Inverness and have a little rest at the side of the loch and allow the animals to go and have a little swim around," Clark told CBS News.

And there's one more wrinkle in this elephantine mystery. In 1933 a circus promoter in the area—acting perhaps on inside information that the monster was really a big top beast—offered a rich reward for Nessie's capture, says Clark, a curator at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow.

Clark's theory is published in the current edition of the journal of the Open University Geological Society.

I don’t believe for a minute that Nessie is an elephant. I also am not convinced that there is a monster in Loc Ness.

Like the bigfoot stories, I’ll believe it when they produce a carcass of the creature.

A giant squid carcass has been found but so far no sea monsters or bigfoot.

Link to the National Geographic paddling pachyderm story here.