10 Reasons Why Bigfoot's A Bust

[Guest LAL]

Gorillas were thought to be a native myth until they were "discovered" by western science.

More on the fossilized chimpanzee teeth:

"Three teeth—a molar and two incisors—likely came from the same individual, a chimpanzee living about 545,000 years ago. "The information is straightforward and very compelling," said William Sanders, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology. "It would be great to have more."

"As tantalizing as it is, it's really frustrating because it shows us how poor the chimpanzee fossil record is," he said."

http://news.national...himp_teeth.html

Edited October 19, 2011 by LAL

[Guest Po Commander]

All of these reasons are true. Why are no bones, or dead bigfoot bodies ever found? Maybe because it doesn't exist...

[Guest 127]

Gorillas were thought to be a native myth until they were "discovered" by western science.

More on the fossilized chimpanzee teeth:

"Three teeth—a molar and two incisors—likely came from the same individual, a chimpanzee living about 545,000 years ago. "The information is straightforward and very compelling," said William Sanders, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology. "It would be great to have more."

"As tantalizing as it is, it's really frustrating because it shows us how poor the chimpanzee fossil record is," he said."

http://news.national...himp_teeth.html

LAL: The only thing that chimpanzee fossils and bigfoot fossils would have in common is that bigfoot is generally theorized to be a primate. Other than that, their environments seem to be quite different and for the bigfoot extremely varied. (allegedly) If bigfoot were only found in the same type of regions as chimpanzee - I would agree with the theory of fossils being unlikely to be found. However, this is not the case with bigfoot.

Bigfoot are reported on nearly every continent of the planet and in varied environments from arid desert areas, to suburbs, to plains. Bones last a long time in some of those areas. Why would we only consider those areas chimpanzees are found in when talking about bigfoot fossils? As you've theorized in other threads bigfoot can easily be baited to mud piles for apples. It leaves me curious how one hasn't been shot with those behavior attributes. They are allegedly sighted crossing roads or near them fairly often in sighting reports. If bigfoot is so elusive and stealth why do people have them visiting their camps and taking baits and spotting them from cars - yet no one has collected one yet in the year 2011. Very intriguing. In fact the United States is one of the most fossil rich countries.

Anyhow, yes chimpanzee fossils are rare - as if that was ever in question. If that has anything to do with bigfoot I'm not so sure according to sighting accounts and their locations.

Edited October 19, 2011 by 127

[Guest Kerchak]

All of these reasons are true. Why are no bones, or dead bigfoot bodies ever found? Maybe because it doesn't exist...

Or maybe there just aren't that many of them and they are not all over the place?

[Guest Po Commander]

Or maybe there just aren't that many of them and they are not all over the place?

I like my theory better. Makes much more sense.

[Guest LAL]

As you've theorized in other threads bigfoot can easily be baited to mud piles for apples.

Please point out where I ever theorized any such thing.

John Green found a correlation between sighting reports and areas with over 20" of rain per annum (that's the only correlation he found). Wet, acidic soils are not conducive to preservation. Perhaps if a team digs up Mt. St. Helens something might be found.

I know of few credible reports from dry areas. Several from near The Dalles, Oregon, were fairly close to a huge forested area. I question whether the same species is seen all over the world.

<added comma>

Edited October 19, 2011 by LAL

[Guest BuzzardEater]

It is not unknown for forest people to bury thier dead in one sacred place.

It seems to me that we humans are only seeing the scouts or outriders. BF children and elderly are rarely seen. Dead could be carried along until the winter camp and then buried with ceremony at the sacred place.

We don't know. The human precedents might not apply. Maybe it just looks that way to us.

Until we have more information to nourish discussion, any old theory must be given some consideration. We argue in a vacuum devoid of known fact.

[Guest Kerchak]

I like my theory better. Makes much more sense.

Course it does, to you. That's why you like it.

I like my theory better. Makes more sense to me.

[Guest 127]

Please point out where I ever theorized any such thing.

John Green found a correlation between sighting reports and areas with over 20" of rain per annum (that's the only correlation he found). Wet, acidic soils are not conducive to preservation. Perhaps if a team digs up Mt. St. Helens something might be found.

I know of few credible reports from dry areas. Several from near The Dalles, Oregon, were fairly close to a huge forested area. I question whether the same species is seen all over the world.

<added comma>

Can bigfoot be baited to a mud pile with apples that humans left? Possible? Impossible?

Edited October 19, 2011 by 127

[Guest StankApe]

Can bigfoot be baited to a mud pile with apples that humans left? Possible? Impossible?

I would like to see someone try to offer bait with a harmless sedative in it. Or maybe a stealthy Turkey Hunter kinda guy sit nearby patiently with a dart gun. Then you could bag Squatchy, take him to the nearest zoo for safekeeping and do all the studying you want! Then let him go later...

If he's really out there that is! :-)

[Guest FuriousGeorge]

I apologize, but I have another fossil rant. lol

Getting back to a previous thought. While we were growing up, pretty much all of us were taught in school that animals from the sea eventually evolved into land animals. In the last one hundred and fifty years, how many people thought about this theory? A billion? Ten billion? I have no idea. I'll let you add the zero's. It's a lot. Like I mentioned before, we didn't have proof of the transition in fossil form until 1998.

In the last one hundred and fifty years, how many people thought about bigfoot as completely and thoroughly as the example above? Again I have no idea but start subtracting a lot of zero's from the number above.

Now compare the two numbers. This is the definition of insufficient, yet the title of his piece claims a conclusion was reached. Interesting.

[Guest]

The absence of bigfoot from the fossil record is relevant. Comparisons to the chimpanzee fossil record are not, unless I missed a memo and chimps dispersed from their tropical forest homes in Africa at least tens of thousands of years ago, spread across Eurasia, crossed the Bering Land Bridge, and came to occupy the whole of North America.

Here's a post from the archives on the fossil record of creatures that do - kind of, because they are now extinct but bigfoots allegedly are not - make a much more logical comparison to bigfoot than that of chimps. Many people make the mistake that because the fossil record is incomplete that it can be dismissed from these discussions. Quite the contrary, I find the lack of bigfoot from the fossil record to be the #2 most important thing that makes me doubt the existence of bigfoot. (Number 1, of course, is the lack of bigfoot from the recent [non-fossilized] record.) Enjoy:

(context: someone had posted that we shouldn't expect bigfoot to appear in the fossil record because it occurs at low population density)

"You are correct: population density (as well as habitat features at the time of death and the time of discovery - and a good bit of luck) plays a big role in the state of the fossil record for various fauna. It is a fundamental principle of ecology (really the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) that herbivores greatly outnumber the carnivores that feed on them. We have many more Triceratops fossils than we do Tyrannosaurus fossils. The same goes for Quaternary mammals. We have many more fossils of ground sloths than we do of ground sloth predators, such as giant short-faced bears. (Just one great resource to learn more about Quaternary mammals in North America.) I just found a paper describing the current database of mammals from Quaternary Mexico to include . . . "more than 15,000 records for 12 orders, 43 families, 146 genera, and 274 species." )

But here's the problem. We even have a lot of fossils of some of these top predators - creatures that must have occurred at low density. Check out the first sentence of the abstract of this paper:

"Fossils of the giant short-faced bear, Arctodus simus (Cope, 1879), have been recovered from over 100 localities in North America, extending from Mexico to Alaska and California to Virginia."

The point of the paper, of course, is that the authors were reporting two additional fossils from another location. So that's 101 locations, some of which produced multiple fossils of these creatures.

Even if you modify your view of this creature from a "top predator," to more of a "roaming scavenger," you have to admit that that's a robust fossil record for a creature about the same size and probably occurring at a similar population density to that assumed for "bigfoot." Short-faced bears, of course, are just one example. Pick a large predatory mammal from the Quaternary of North America - bears, lions, wolves - we have lots of fossils of these things from all manner of habitats.

So we have a rich fossil record of large mammals - even large mammals that we would expect to occur at low densities - from all over North America. Despite the fact that it's really rare for a fossil to form and even rarer for some knowledgeable human to find it and take steps to get it curated and described in the peer-reviewed literature, we've got a boatload of fossil material. This includes the large mammals that are still with us today: bears, mountain lions, moose, bison - all are well-represented in fossil record.

All except bigfoot, that is.

We might consider something like a bigfoot dispersing overland from Asia to North America via the Bering Land Bridge some time in the mid-to late Pleistocene, just like several other large mammals did. If so, then such creatures must have made use (for generations) of lots of different habitats, just like the other mammals did: forests, steppe grassland, wetlands, muskeg, lakeshores, river corridors, coastlines, etc. Thus it is perfectly rational, reasonable, logical, and scientifically predictable that we should have found at least ONE bigfoot fossil amid all those others. Given that bigfoot is presumed to still be extant, it's also had 10,000–20,000 years of additional opportunity to have the remains of JUST ONE preserved and found, relative to its now extinct Pleistocene counterparts.

So let no one convince you that the lack of bigfoot fossil material is no problem for acceptance of claims that such a creature exists today - it's a big problem, and the problem grows with every paper published on new Quaternary fossil discoveries that do not include such a species. The problem isn't that there should be lots of bigfoot fossils (though there should be) given its reputed range and presumed history of occurrence in the New World (or the Old, for that matter), the problem is that there should be at least one. The lack of a bigfoot fossil record certainly does not prove that they don't exist (I wonder how many times I'll have to write that phrase before people will remember it), but it is highly suggestive."

~Saskeptic (from a while ago)

[Guest FuriousGeorge]

"Relevant"? Yes, I concede. Conclusive? I'm not there yet.

[georgerm]

Because in the early 20th Century - on the heels of the extinctions of Passenger Pigeons, Carolina Parakeets, Bachman's Warblers, etc. - there was intense interest in saving the last surviving members of our rarest species in North America, among them Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, California Condors, and Whooping Cranes. Those last Whooping Cranes were very closely monitored for years. The only problem was that no one had, until 1954, found the paltry 7 or 8 pairs of birds on their individual nesting ponds in one of the most inhospitable and vast landscapes remaining in North America. But found they were, true needles in an immense haystack, 57 years ago.

All living Whooping Cranes today are descendants from that flock of 15. We know that because the current captive breeding program (and official "stud book" to maximize genetic diversity) began with eggs collected from those nesting pairs. Yes, it's possible that a pair have been living undetected in a park in suburban Cleveland, but after all these years, there's been no evidence that this is the case.

But part of that "description" includes where the things live. If bigfooters agree that bigfoots are big and hairy, then someone like Radford can investigate those specific claims. Part of his investigation should include other things that are big and hairy, e.g., he should evaluate claims to gauge the likelihood that the person making the report actually encountered a bear. This is easy to do by determining if the witness claims to have seen the big, hairy thing running on two legs.

One specific claim is that bigfoots don't appear in the fossil record because they occur in forests with highly acidic soils that quickly degrade bone and prevent its fossilization. That claim is easy to evaluate by determining where people claim to have seen bigfoots. If the claims include habitats and geographic regions that do readily produce fossils, then the acidic soils excuse for bigfoot's absence from the fossil record is untenable.

That's all Radford has done, and I've made the same argument here many times. Soil pH does not explain the lack of bigfoot in the fossil record because bigfoots are frequently reported from places that lack acidic soils. It's neither mine nor Radford's fault that this is the case. I'd also gladly revisit my position on this if someone could demonstrate to me a hypothetical bigfoot distribution that is limited to acidic soils that deter fossilization. Though I've been posing this question for years, no one has come forward to propose such a distribution.

How many species of animals living today don't show up in the fossil record? Do we have fossils of the Hooping Crane or the bison thought to have been extinct? How many animals remain undiscovered because the fossils have not been recovered? one, thousands......how many?

The conditions for creating a fossil, then to have this fossil discovered are one in many thousands of occurrences.

What about the teeth of the giant BF like ape that lived in Asia?

Why is it that most of the sightings in Oregon occur in areas where BF has cover and the proper habitat as shown by dots on a map?

[Guest LAL]

Can bigfoot be baited to a mud pile with apples that humans left? Possible? Impossible?

You didn't respond to my request. I replied to your question on the other thread.

On fossilization:

http://www.fossilmus...ssilization.htm

I think it's quite possible there is a least one fossil but it hasn't been found - or it has been found but was misidentified as a piece of mammoth or other large Pleistocene animal. It's possible there are remains or natural molds a la Pompeii under a couple of hundred feet of St. Helens ash but who's looking? There could be something underwater somewhere in what was once the 1000 mile wide Bering Land Bridge. There are fossil beds in the PNW but the era or the habitat tends to be wrong for a migrant hominoid primate adapted to a forested environment. How many bear fossils are there that weren't found in caves?

<edited to change wording>

Edited October 19, 2011 by LAL