Reports of a large, long-necked serpent loping around the waterways of the Scottish highlands date back as far as the 7th century A.D. The monster of Loch Ness — a deep freshwater lake in northern Scotland — has been seen crossing country roads and peering out from wooded glens, but its most famed habitat is the lake that spawned its name. In the past century, dozens of scientists have conducted sonar scans and plunged inside submersibles into the lake's depths, sometimes picking up tantalizing, albeit inconclusive, readings of some mysterious, unusually sized object. However, a 2003 study commissioned by the BBC employed satellite tracking and took sonar readings from around 600 different locations in the lake and yielded nothing — consigning the fabled creature almost definitively back to the realm of myth.