A colleague of mine, now retired, was once invited to a lunch with Sir Edmund Hillary, at which he was asked to help in the search for Yeti as part of an upcoming trip to the Himalayas. His reply, wisely, was “I’ll be the first to join your second expedition.”

I think that as recently as the 1930s, there was still a non-zero chance of finding a new, largish (larger than a turkey?) previously undiscovered mammal in North America. But the war effort (WW II) saw the cutting of the eastern forests for pallets (thus the demise, or near demise, of the US Ivory Billed Woodpecker) and subsequent rampant logging of the Northwest, have combined to eliminate that possibility. I would say that this probability is now zero.

One could argue that Canada still has vast poorly known tracts of forest in which something as yet undiscovered could still lurk. It is true that these vast forests exist. Indeed, I find it interesting that every year a number of Golden Eagles (turkey sized birds?) show up in the US Northeast each fall in a kind of migration (eagles are kind of iffy as truly migratory birds, but they do move around in the winter), and it is believed that they come from somewhere in Canada, but no one seems to know where.

Frankly, I think a map of bigfoot sightings might be an interesting sociological study.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out this very interesting post at “Tree Toed Sloth” about the molecular evidence of bigfoot’s phylogeny. What is really cool about this post is that the Tibetan Yeti is closely related to the horse, while the North American Sasquatch is closely related to the cow, based on hair samples taken from locals where the animal was sighted.

(This is also discussed here, on Chrononautic Log)