Many people believe the Nessie, Loch Ness Monster is an evolved Plesiosaur. These dinosaurs were carnivorous aquatic reptiles with long necks and the body in the shape of a turtle without a shell. These dinosaurs were first found in England, so it is possible that one or more survived through the ages; however, the plesiosaur’s neck wasn’t designed to bend upward to the degree that they could left their heads above the water as most Nessie pictures show. Even if they could, gravity would have tipped their body forward which would keep most of their neck in the water. It is possible for their head to reach the surface, but not in the typical “Nessie pose”. Nessie has also been thought to be some sort of long necked seal, an eel, an unknown amphibian species, or some sort of invertebrate. It could also be a plesiosaur that has evolved from their fossilized ancestors.

Loch Ness is the largest body of fresh water in Britain. It’s 754 feet deep, 22.5 miles long, and 1-1.5 miles wide. It is said that the loch never freezes, which could account for how the dinosaur survived through the ages. Below 100 feet, the temperature of the water never varies from 44 degrees Fahrenheit due to a thermocline. There is a large cavern system deep in the lake where Nessie is thought to hide.

The Loch Ness Monster has been a popular myth since at least 1933, but there have been reported sitings since as early as 565 by Saint Columbia, who wrote that a beast rose from the loch and attacked a man swimming out to retrieve a boat.

Over the past 4 years, people have debated the monster’s existence on a picture I took of a statue at Eccles Dinosaur part of a Plesiosaur on my photo gallery at The Lens Flare. On this page, I ask the question, could this dinosaur be the ancestor of the Loch Ness Monster? People have misinterpreted my question as “Is this the real Nessie?” and hundreds of people have commented.

The picture recently reached 100,000 views and is the first image on The Lens Flare to do so largely due to the fact that it often shows up on the first page of Google’s image search for phrases like “Loch Ness Monster” and other variations, and the number of visits to this picture per week has dramatically increased since the show “The Water Horse” hit the big screen putting Nessie back in the spotlight. I invite you to take part in the conversation of Nessie on my picture The Loch Ness Monster’s Great Great Granddad.

One of my goals is to have a million visitors combined for all of my websites in a year.  In 2007, 412,425 people visited my websites, with the majority of them going to The Lens Flare, my photography and art community.  I’ve been working on a new version of that site for several months and have just released a beta version to the members of that community.  In about two weeks, I plan on making the beta version live.  The new site is so much better, I’m hoping that it will attract a million visitors in 2008. 

One of my goals is to attract a million people in a year to my websites collectively.  From January 1 to September 30 of 2007, there have been 312k visitors to my various websites (averaged out to 416k in a year).  The Lens Flare, my art and photography community, has received the majority of visitors for good reason.  There are over 30,000 images on there.  However, my fantasy & science fiction site, Desert Realm, still gets a fair amount of traffic even though I haven’t done much with that site recently.  I’ve recently added 2 blogs to the mix.  This blog and my tech blog, Ask Some Geeks, is starting to get a little traffic, which should increase as more postings are written.

One of my goals is to have a million visitors to my websites in a year so it’s probably a good idea to log where I’m at now.

My flagship site is The Lens Flare, an art and photography community, which has close to a thousand members and currently 30k pictures on the site.

Over the last 365 days, there have been 323,978 human visitors (I say human because there are a lot of automated programs such as Googlebot that download the site’s content so that they can add it to their search engines).  Collectively, the visitors have looked at 2,387,041 pages.  Over the last 30 days, there have been 35,644 visitors (which average out to about 427k visitors over a year’s time).

So at the current pace, I’m about half there.