Bigfoot

Bigfoot Frame from the Patterson-Gimlin film, showing "Patty" turning towards the camera. Category Cryptohominid Proposed scientific names Paranthropus eldurrelli (Strasenburgh, 1971), Gigantopithecus canadensis (Krantz, 1985), Australopithecus canadensis (Krantz, 1985), Gigantanthropus canadensis (Krantz, 1985) Other names See below Country reported Canada, United States First reported 1840 Prominent investigators • John W. Burns • John Green • René Dahinden • Ivan T. Sanderson • Peter Byrnes • Grover S. Krantz • John Bindernagel • Jeffrey Meldrum

Bigfoot or the sasquatch is a cryptohominid most prominently reported from the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the United States, particularly in the provinces and states of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California, as well as Idaho and the Alaskan Panhandle. Similar cryptohominids have been reported from every U.S. state excluding Hawaii, some of which have been given their own names, but some cryptozoologists reserve the term bigfoot, and especially sasquatch, for the Pacific Northwest reports. Bigfoot is particularly associated with the large humanoid footprints which give it its name, and which have been assigned to the ichnotaxon Anthropoidipes ameriborealis.

Hairy men like the boqs of British Columbia, sometimes interpreted as primates similar to bigfoot, occasionally featured in the Amerindian folklore of the Pacific Northwest, and a relationship between bigfoot and cannibal giants, humanoid beings appearing in Amerindian mythology across North America, has also been proposed, but not all cryptozoologists accept this. European reports of hairy "wildmen" occasionally occured in North America throughout the 19^th Century, but did not become famous until the 1920s, when British Columbian journalist John W. Burns coined the name sasquatch out of several Salish terms for similar beings. In northern California, the stories became well-known in 1958, when construction workers at Bluff Creek discovered "large hominoid footprints," inspiring the name bigfoot. Since then, bigfoot or the sasquatch has become North America's most famous cryptid, to the extent that cryptohominids from around the world have been referred to as bigfoot.

North America is not known to have had indigenous primates since the Neogene period, so it is assumed that any putative North American ape must, like humans, have crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia. Historically, the most popular theory regarding bigfoot's identity, promoted by Grover S. Krantz, has been an American version of Gigantopithecus, a great ape only known from East Asian remains. Some cryptozoologists believe that two distinct primates are being described, one larger, responsible for the A. ameriborealis tracks; and the other smaller, associated with water and restricted to temperate swamps and lowlands. A minority opinion holds that sightings and Amerindian legends could refer to some other bipedal mammal, such as a ground sloth or an unknown species of bear.