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Urkelbot, I'm an applied scientist, a licensed professional chemical engineer. I taught chemistry at West Point from '93 to '97 and directed 18 faculty in the coordinated instruction of over 900 students. As an officer in the Army the physical training and physical performance of the cadets, soldiers, and junior officers under my command were a daily concern. I'm not a stranger to physical performance and I'm not a stranger to either research or academia. I've performed research, published a thesis that became required reading in the chemical engineering department at UVA, and have, since then, been awarded both US and European patents stemming from my own research and development. It is likely, since we are beginning to commercialize it now, that you will have the technology I've invented in your home within the next two to three years. Now, I've taken a break from the writing of a protocol for the deployment of my technology in a hospital ward to respond to your email (actually, I'm procrastinating). I'll give you a simple source with embedded references to which you can refer and springboard into your own search. I'm confident that within an hour you will convince yourself that I have made valid points. Start with this meta-site regarding Vital Capacity and note the rapid increase in lung volume vs height in human males. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vital_capacity. You will note that a mere 10 inch increase in height from 60 inches to 70 inches results in an increase in lung volume from 2900 cubic centimeters to 4300 cubic centimeters. This is a 48% increase in lung capacity resulting from less than a 17% increase in height. So a healthy five foot ten inch male has almost half again the lung capacity of a healthy five foot male. There's a point, though, at which you need to stop relying on articles that are the derivative analysis of other articles and start experiencing things directly. There are plenty of people who write things about bigfoot without ever having seen one. I've stood face to face at close range with an 8.5 foot adult male for 45 seconds with nothing between me and him but sagebrush that was knee-high on me and shin high on him. Middle of an August afternoon in direct sunlight. I was close enough to see the muscle definition of his abs beneath his hair. He stood fully erect with his shoulders back. They were wider than a doorway, and his waist was between 2 and 2.5 feet wide. A triangular torso with an Olympian physique. Now, they're definitely hominids, and the comparison may not be Macintosh apples to Macintosh apples, but it is definitely Macintosh apples to Granny Smith apples, with us being the Granny Smith apples. So extrapolate and determine what the lung capacity would be for a putative 102 inch healthy adult human male with an Olympian physique. You can also look up the relative masses of human males of varying heights and the relative muscle mass as well. You will find that as height increases, the ratio of muscle mass to lung volume decreases. Oxygenation is a matter of chemistry. The availability of oxygen (bigger lungs correspond to greater tidal volume) and the prevalence of hemoglobin (more blood volume corresponds to more hemoglobin and better oxygen transport (assuming roughly equal hemoglobin concentrations) translate into a greater oxygen supply. Assuming a well nourished individual, the supply of oxygen is usually the rate limiting consideration in the conversion of stored energy to physical action, and physical power, or in the most efficient use of stored energy while at rest. If oxygen is plentiful enough, you get more efficient oxygenation of stored energy with fewer waste compounds, just as your car burns gasoline more efficiently if its oxygen supply is sufficient. You compare mice to elephants. Where on the graph do cheetahs lie? How about race horses? I'm sure that they are outliers. The danger of boiling the whole mammalian kingdom down to a single linear graph is that you normalize the outlying high performance mammals. The few outliers are discarded in favor of the norm, in favor of the prosaic, in favor of the unremarkable. And in a way, I feel that you are trying to lasso the remarkable and force it into the prosaic. I encourage you to supplement the derivation of knowledge from the work of others with the development of knowledge from your own efforts. It leads to advances that can benefit both yourself and others. And it can be rewarding. Become an Urkelnaut!

Updated Chart Sorry about posting a half-a**ed chart the first time; should've gotten the job done and then posted. This is a cheat sheet for the non-hunting/non-wildlife specialist inquiring minds. I put this together to try to create a reasonable estimate - based on known critters and hominids - of biological parameters for bigfoot. I wanted those parameters so that I could make a reasonable guess of whether sighting "A" in, say 1978 in Westmoreland County, PA, might be the same bigfoot as sighting B in (again, only for example) 1991 in Cambria County. It's also an attempt to have some sort of metric to determine whether certain sightings just don't make sense - for example, a 1970s sighting in the heart of a suburb outside of Philly, where there is no open ground for miles around. To answer where I got the values for bigfoot - pure S*W*A*G*. One thing that jumps out at me that if a bigfoot is sighted at point "A" today, the best place to go looking might be a wooded area 20 miles away instead of rushing to point A, like everyone else, since both places might be part of that bigfoot's "home territory." The other interesting idea, touched on by Cowlitz2, is that one bigfoot (or bigfoot family group) might have several widely separated home areas that they rotate/migrate between. (I.e., something like winter and summer feeding grounds f/moose or deer.) If so, sightings in 1990 in Ohio might relate to 1995 sightings in New York. Biology Comparisons vBFF.doc