The real truth about the Sasquatch

As a proud native of the great Pacific Northwest, when an article on one of our noblest creatures was mentioned to me, I had to read it. Here’s the center of the story.

In July 2005, nine residents of Teslin, Yukon,
witnessed through a kitchen window a large bipedal
animal moving through the brush. The next morning, they
collected a tuft of coarse, dark hair and also observed a
footprint measuring 43 cm in length and 11.5 cm in width.

That’s right: physical evidence, a footprint and hair, from…Bigfoot. The Sasquatch. A sample captured in the wild and brought into the lab. Pinned against the wall, trapped and unable to escape the probing appendages of an implacable, intrusive Science.

So they extracted DNA from the hair and amplified conserved mammalian sequences. They sequenced fragments of the DNA and compared them against sequences in the databases, and got a shocking answer. Prepare yourself: here is a diagram of the phylogenetic relationship of Sasquatch to other mammalian species.

i-f917d5dd7868188506e91ce434e810f0-sasquatch_tree.jpg
Maximum parsimony tree illustrating the position of the Sasquatch hair sample. Bootstrap support values are given at the nodes. The species and GenBank accession numbers are water buffalo Bubalus bubalis*, yak Bos mutus, cow Bos taurus, wisent Bos bonasus, and
North American bison Bison bison.

The scientists squirm and try to avoid the obvious conclusions of their results, inventing foolish excuses rather than facing reality.

There are several possible explanations for these
results. First, as suggested from molecular analysis of
hair from a suspected Yeti, the Sasquatch might be a
highly elusive ungulate that exhibits surprising morphological convergence with primates. Alternately, the hair
might have originated from a real bison and be unrelated
to the Sasquatch. Parsimony would favor the second
interpretation, in which case, the identity and taxonomy
of this enigmatic and elusive creature remains a mystery.

I wonder what Radical Sasquatch will think of this.

*Wait a minute…the scientific name for the water buffalo is Bubalus bubalis? Bubalus bubalis? No wonder they’re so mean.

Coltman D, Davis C (2006) Molecular cryptozoology meets the Sasquatch . Trends in Ecology and Evolution 21(2):60-61.

Tool of heretics

i-34b48995a5829cdc0fc06f5bdfa455f2-octodog.jpg

I have been informed of the existence of this device.

Do not be fooled. It transforms an inelegant tube-shaped dense paste of chopped chordate parts into a crude, inaccurate semblance of that pinnacle of molluscan evolution, the cephalopod. What next? Will Steven Spielberg take a mound of hamburger, call it George Clooney, and give it a starring role in his next movie? Shall I put a pot of alphabet soup on the stove and call it lyric poetry?

It is blasphemy. When the Great Old Ones come, I know who will be eaten first.

Hiya, Leonardo!

Ah, so that’s what this scienceblogs.com thing is all about: we’re a Vehicle for Upscale Ads. It feels a bit strange to be viewed as a “vehicle”. I see this as more of a virus, with the corporate world as the host vehicle, and I’m exploiting them in order to get fast free network hosting.

So that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. This simplistic characterization of you readers, though, is a bit disturbing.

The research has identified about 20 million Americans, 7 percent of the population, who are labeled in the study as “Leonardos,” named after da Vinci for their avid, Renaissance-style interest in science as well as subjects like art and politics.

Leonardos are mostly male, in their 30’s and middle to upper class, said Eliza Esquivel, a planner at JWT New York who is working with Ms. Cortizo on the study.

Yeesh. I think of my readers as much more diverse than that, and I hope I never end up pandering to a narrow demographic.

It’s very weird to read about this particular endeavor filtered through the eyes of business drones—it has no relationship at all to how I think about it. Fortunately, I am isolated from the business end of all this, and don’t worry—if some 30 year old guy in a business suit with an MBA tries to tell me what content to put here, I’ll be gone.