Blinn

<a href="http://www.isu.edu/~meldd/fxnlmorph.html" target="_blank">EVALUATION OF ALLEGED SASQUATCH FOOTPRINTS AND THEIR INFERRED FUNCTIONAL MORPHOLOGY</a>

Whaddaya think? I believe there is going to be a Discovery Channel program this fall on the topic of "Science Meets Sasquatch..." Here's more on <a href="http://www.isu.edu/departments/bios/Professors_Staff/meldrum_d.htm" target="_blank">Dr. Meldrum</a>.

The Lone Ranger

Well, if there are 8-foot hominids roaming these forests, they're doing an extraordinarily good job of hiding. Despite all the efforts to find a Sasquatch, no one has ever come up with anything more convincing than some fuzzy photos and a few footprints that could easily have been faked. (Contrary to what some people seem to think, pressure ridges and even dermal ridges aren't particularly difficult to fake.)

A recent issue of <a href="http://www.csicop.org/si/2002-03/bigfoot.html" target="_blank">Skeptical Inquirer</a> has discussed the issue in some depth. Their general conclusion is that the available evidence is unconvincing, at best.

From an ecological and population genetics perspective, the existence of Bigfoot is improbable indeed. How could there be a population of such a large animal that is large enough to be self-sustaining, yet decades of searching have failed to produce a single specimen?

I've spent a lot of time roaming through the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and they're vast, true, but they're hardly unexplored. There are hundreds of thousands of hikers, hunters, and (in my case) biologists roaming these woods, and none of us has ever brought back a Sasquatch.

Does that mean that Bigfoot doesn't exist? Of course not. But it doesn't seem likely.

Cheers,

Michael

Xeluan

Australia has its own version of Bigfoot called the Yowie. While you do have your intrepid <a href="http://www.yowiehunters.com/" target="_blank">Yowie Hunters</a> they still have yet to provide any conclusive evidence.

Xeluan

Blinn

Thanks Michael, for the link to the article. I agree, one must remain a skeptic without any hard evidence, particularly a body, but at the same time I'm intrigued to see biologists evaluating what "evidence" there is.

On another note, that's some beautiful country you've got out there in the PNW. I've been to Washington a couple of times to climb Rainier. What's your area of research? I'm a conservation biologist, working mostly on fish & amphibians.

Jeremy Pallant

Ahh, Cryptozoology...

Other large animals that remain undiscovered despite persistent rumors:

The Sucuriju Gigante of Brazil. Aka the Giant Anaconda that some claim can grow to 100' long. I'd be delighted if it existed, but so far nothing has surfaced.

The Megalania Prisca of Australia. Supposedly a giant goanna (monitor) twice the length and several times the weight of a Komodo Dragon.

An animal called the chequah by the Potawatomi and the ba'a' by the Comanche. Also known as the Thunderbird, despite the US being fairly well explored, rumors still persist of a giant condor-like bird with a wingspan of 15 to 20 feet.

Just to mention a few.

The Lone Ranger

I'm basically a behavioral and physiological ecologist. I'm currently looking at how habitat fragmentation affects snowshoe hare populations. Hopefully, this work will have wider applications, and will prove useful for conservation purposes.

Cheers,

Michael


"Molesting anurans" indeed! Hee hee!

I just love frogs, I have to admit, and I wish we had more amphibian species here. They're so cute, what with their bug eyes and all. Still, they aren't warm and fuzzy like my bunnies.

-- Michael

[Edited to add the "P.S." after I read Zetek's profile.]

[ August 14, 2002: Message edited by: The Lone Ranger ]</p>

Blinn

Like <a href="http://www.joecartoon.com/pages/goanna/" target="_blank">this</a>?



Oops, that link automatically redirects. Check out "Goanna Humpah" under New Stuff.

[ August 14, 2002: Message edited by: Zetek ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

Now that’s a bit of Aussie slang I hadn’t expected...

Question is, does it involve seabirds, or... [no, better not go there ]

Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

Back to sasquatches...

I remember from back in my credulous days in the late 70s (hey, I was ten...) reading in Landsburg’s In Search of Myths and Monsters about the foot pathology example mentioned on that page. According to Landsburg (or an interviewee), ‘cripplefoot’, if a fake, would have had to have been designed by an “anatomical genius”, capable working out how the foot of an 800lb biped of a different, unknown species would adapt to the injury -- the weight distribution was different from how it would be in humans. Apparently.

Put like that, it looked pretty good evidence. (Put like that, I guess it still does.) Then again, the book was rather enamoured with the Gimlin/Patterson footage too . I’m amazed that page still mentions it -- I thought it’d been thoroughly discredited? (Chris Packham in the BBC’s X-Creatures (IIRC) recreated the scene at Bluff Creek with a bloke in a gorilla suit and got a rather similar bit of footage; and it’s odd the way the bugger keeps looking at the camera.)

But does anyone know of modern info on / refutations of ‘cripplefoot’ apart from that page?

“Flat, flexible foot”, huh? Flat and flexible like the sole of a modelled boot, perhaps?

That’s curious. A modern species of such a biped would likely be an offshoot of the robust Australopithecines. Now, I’d have to check, but I think later big hominids were fairly well adapted to bipedality. And why might such a huge primate, if it walked on its hind legs, have retained any prehensile abilities in them? The main reason would be that it’s still somewhat arboreal (as in A afarensis). But isn’t a fully grown sasquatch a bit big to go up most trees?

I’m not saying these thoughts refute the idea, just that if the thing is real, it’s got to fit in with everything else we know, and I’m not sure it does.

Cheers, Oolon

Corwin

Actually there's a pretty substantial part of the Cascades and the Rockies that is largely unexplored... nobody ever goes up there. (Or extremely rarely anyway.) Likewise with Tibet. We basically know what's up there, but there are regions where decades pass without any humans in the area.

Sasquatch actually has a quite rational explanation... we're familiar with another species of hominid, (not a human ancestor as far as we can tell) called Gigantopithicus. We know virtually nothing about them, and supposedly they're extinct. But so was the Coelacanth... until somebody caught one. Some species that are believed to be extinct have later been discovered to just be extremely rare, and prefer isolated environments. (The coelacanth is an extremely deep water fish.)

There are legends all around the pacific coast concerning a creature that basically matches this description. On the one hand, it could just be a manifestation of the 'wild man' legend. On the other.... it could be occasional sitings of extant giganto's.... The stories range from southeast asia around to the pacific coast... which was roughly giganto's range.