There are some people who really, really want Sasquatch to be real. I suspect they’re not even that fussy –Image by Modulate Sasquatch would be great, but Big Foot, Yeti, Yowie, Yeren, Barmanou, Orang Mawas or Tjutjuna would be fine. Unfortunately there is no credible scientific evidence that any of these creatures exists, although there is fossil evidence for giant primates many thousands of years ago in what is now China, India and Vietnam. Assigned to the genus Gigantopithecus, these primates would have weighed half a tonne and stood up to 3 metres tall (if they stood upright at all, which is in dispute). Anyway, those determined to uncover new evidence might find some hope in recent research reported in the Journal of Biogeography.

There have been plenty of reported Sasquatch sightings, especially around Oregon, Washington and North West California. Jeff Lozier, Peter Aniello and Mike Hickerson took geographic data from reported Sasquatch sightings, putative auditory detections, and footprint measurements gathered over the last 65 years. They then used this information to develop an ecological niche model (ENM) too predict the likely distribution of North American Sasquatch, using several software packages and lots of lovely biostatistics.

They take this further to predict possible changes to this distribution that are likely to result from climate change. This might seem like a lot of effort to go to for an animal the existence of which is yet to be established (even Peter Hickerson says that he “doesn’t believe in Big Foot” although he thinks a search is worthwhile) but wait – there’s more. The researchers then went on to show how their methods could be used to develop an ENM for a better-known species, the American Black Bear (Ursus americanus).

As it turns out the predicted range of Black Bears and Sasquatch overlap quite considerably and the researchers conclude that many reported sightings of Big Foot are in fact sightings of Black Bear. Woops.

The article combines very sound scientific methods with a light-hearted approach to expose the risks of over-valuing observation data. Advances in computing power and data storage and manipulation technology have allowed a greater selection of data to be used in ENMs. Generally this is good thing – for example ecologists and conservation biologists need to be able to predict the range of rare and endangered species, with limited first hand data, but the authors are worried that some studies over-value the results of ecological niche modelling.

If any of this is disappointing to Big Foot devotees, don’t be depressed - bears have pretty big feet too . . .