The Sasquatch Sequel

"It very much sets us back, but it also teaches us a lesson and shows us we need to think ahead," says Loren Coleman, a zoologist and consultant to such TV shows as NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries" and the Discovery Channel's "In the Unknown." But Coleman's Sasquatch-centric  Web site, Cryptomundo.com, crashed when it got 5 million hits the hour after he posted a picture of the Georgia  creature slumped in a freezer. The next day traffic was up to 13 million hits every 10 minutes, proof that Bigfoot curiosity will not die even if the creature never lived.

"It's aggravating that a person like [Biscardi] garners the press because of sensationalism," says Jeff Meldrum, an Idaho anthropologist who is an expert in foot morphology and locomotion in monkeys, apes and hominids. "There are certainly activities that are laughable," says Meldrum. "But there are also those that are attempting to legitimize a very serious inquiry into the possible existence of a relic population of great ape. This is my odyssey, this is my quest."

Over the last dozen years, Meldrum has collected and studied more than 200 plaster casts of footprints, some as big as 16 inches, made from across the United States and Canada. On them he notes details such as ridge lines and tendon indentations that he says would be impossible for fraudsters to fabricate. Last October, Meldrum presented some of his evidence to a symposium of 40 paleontologists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, and emerged with a peer-reviewed published paper acknowledging that what he'd collected were not the prints of a known species, nor were they hoaxes, but genuine casts of an unknown North American primate.

Meldrum was given the authority to classify the beast with a taxonomical name, the Anthropoides Ameriborealis, which translates into North American ape. It might not seem like much compared with a body in a freezer, but in the uphill battle of Bigfoot science, it's a huge step, and as close to acknowledged scientific proof as anything seen to to date. "It has certainly helped me shift the perception from that of tabloid fodder into the arena of biology," says Meldrum.  "But a new species will only be recognized when DNA is collected."

Until then the search for Bigfoot will remain part sensationalist commercialism and part legitimate scientific research.

And Meldrum, much like the creature he believes is out there, will continue his work largely unseen and unheard.

With Chanan Tigay

© 2008