Just one word dominated the worlds press that day:
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Ricky Dyer went back to his house with a copy of every daily newspaper under his arm. The worlds media had been camped outside his home for the past few days, since the National Science Foundation and the British Museum emailed their press releases to the Reuters News Agency.
Ricky loved being the centre of attention and relished every photo opportunity and would gladly speak to reporter’s time again about how he made the discovery.
Once inside, Ricky sat down at his dining room table and thumbed his way through every newspaper reading over again what the press had written about him and his find. He stared for ages at the photographs, particularly liking the aerial shots of him in his boat with the skeleton beneath him.
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Who’d have thought, he plain old Ricky Dyer would be the one to find such a thing. He was still under no illusion that it was pure luck that he found it. The summer had been hot and with very little rain fall, the lakes were running low.
Ricky was a keen amateur fisherman and liked to holiday at Lake Gorthleck, Scotland as it was his favourite place to fish. The waters around the edges were shallow due to the drought, but he knew it would be deeper in the middle. So, Ricky cast off in his small rowing boat and headed for deeper waters.
Ricky let down his line and waited. It was not long when his fishing rod began to bend. He had caught a fish. He tried to haul it in but soon realised whatever he had on the other end of his line was not a fish but something else in the lake.
He tried with all his might to bring it up, but whatever he had caught was not budging. He was in two minds whether to cut his line free, when slowly something was making its way to the surface.
Ricky leaned over the side of his boat and hauled out what he described later to the news reporters, as I giant wingnut but made of bone!
Ricky threw it in the back of his boat and continued to fish. When he got back to shore later that day, he showed his find to some of the locals in the pub.
The 'locals' were in fact a group of archaeologists working on a Roman dig near-by and when they saw what Ricky had found they became excited and phoned their colleagues at the university.
Dave Chisholm, lead archaeologist, confirmed that Ricky had found part of a vertebra belonging to a gigantic unknown prehistoric creature, and could he take him to the site. Soon, the area was swamped with archaeologists and Ricky kept his promise and took them to the lake, or loch as there are known in Scotland.
For countless years now: scientists, boffins and amateur trophy hunters had been looking in the wrong place. Sure the area was right, Loch Ness, in the Scottish Highlands. But the Loch was wrong. It was the loch near-by, Gorthleck, that had the remains of the dragon. The real Loch Ness Monster!
