Are You Bigfoot?

Smithsonian Fellow Eliécer Gutiérrez debunks projections that hair samples found in the Himalayans belong to Yeti, arguing instead that they belonged to a brown bear.

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Eliécer Gutiérrez recently co-authored an article in ZooKeys that helped disprove other researchers’ findings, which claimed that samples of hair attributed to a Himalayan Yeti were from an unknown bear species.

Eliécer and his colleague Dr. Ronald Pine with the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas found that the reputed Yeti sample they examined most likely came from a Himalayan Brown Bear, which is well-known to occur in the Himalayas.

You can read more about Eliécer’s work to chase down the Yeti here.