What I find most significant about this story - and maybe someone else mentioned this, I didn’t read all the comments - is that this animal kept up with a car for “over five minutes”. I don’t know how FAST the witnesses were driving, but it seems like these animals have {or at least THIS ONE had} considerable running *stamina*. I know the African cheetah can hit 70 mph, but that is just in short bursts. And squatches have two less legs. ‘Nuff said.

While I’m not so obsessed over the fossil record regarding the modern existence of BF, it is worth noting that the vastness of Eurasia’s northern plains has barely been scratched and yet there are fossils of erectus and even sapiens occasionally found. I’m not a fan of the idea that gigantopithecus blackii is the ancestor but rather an example which proves that primates have in the past experienced gigantism and so we can speculate that nature, following a well used and effective tact, would use it again though not for the same purpose necessarily.

The process of preservation for which Beringia is so well known, freezing, has revealed some interesting finds but even so, were a hydraulic miner in up along the Klondike, finding a rack of ribs of big size isn’t likely to think it’s a primate…and +25K year old bones are pretty common up there, with scraps of mammoth teeth enamel scattered across the ground.

It’s been mentioned that climatic warming will be presenting researchers in lots of fields with newly opened windows through which they can examine previously hidden data. We’d have to be ready to recognize the evidence should we stumble over some.

When I first heard that sas sightings came from all over North America, I thought, uh oh, not real, UFOs here. I’d convinced myself it was a critter of the Pacific Northwest. It wasn’t until I read the BFRO site, and thought about it some, that I could see that that broad distribution made perfect sense - much more, in fact, than it being a “regional monster,” which Bindernagel (that’s his term) points out as a critical barrier to public and scientific acceptance of the species. (i.e., people from that part of the country have a quaint legend.)

When I started thinking that Bering Land Bridge migration, and not primate evolution, might be the source of the sas, the same thing happened. Wait, I thought, that was (as you put it) mammoth steppe, not forest. But I hadn’t thought about the sas adaptations that would work well in open country - nor about the vast larder that was moving over that bridge with it.

And one wonders whether this might open a new potential for places to search for subfossil remains.

The more you think, the more you know - and the lack of speculation by the scientific mainstream on the sas is keeping us stuck in ignorance at this point.

But what dogu4 and I are talking about are adaptations in the sasquatch that seem perfect fits to what scientists describe as the evolutionary influence on habitat selection that happened with humans. None of the other apes have nearly the competence in treeless country of our two species. We are clearly divergent from them in the way we have adapted to occupy a multiplicity of habitats. And we’ve done some of the same things - tireless, efficient, speedy bipedal travel; sharply increased carnivory; much more useful forelimbs.

Maybe our extreme social bent - we make chimps and gorillas and monkeys look like loners - has given us a critical advantage. (Including ways to vastly multiply the uses of those useful forelimbs.) But other than that, we seem to be sasquatch with better grooming. By our lights.

And we never have truly left the forest, have we?

Also, if you look at a north polar projection of the earth it becomes evident that once the so called “land bridge” between Asia and North America is in its normal relationship with regards to glaciation and sea levels historically, the super-landform of what I think is sometimes called “laurentia” presents a grassland unlike any that exists today in composition and size. How could one of the planets most adaptable, and wide ranging family of animals have missed out on that niche? I suspect that they didn’t for long…and long before the arrival of h. sapiens. Pressures and climate change would drive these surviving population into forests which could support them where they’d find their abilities to survive the northern climates a pre-adaption which would suit them very well for lower latitudes but higher altitudes.

Interesting speculation there. First time I’ve heard it, and of course it makes incredible sense. Isn’t that what we say of our own evolution - Proconsul going upright and forsaking the trees for the open savanna?

Of course there are modern analogues to the sas. They just aren’t primates. The brown bear and the wolf clearly evolved as animals of open country, just as clearly as the black bear with its tree-climbing ability evolved as a forest critter. They populated the American plains in great numbers, as Lewis and Clark could attest (frequently to their dismay). But thanks primarily to the coming of “civilized” European man, both primarily occupy forests or high alpine country now (other than those in the Arctic - where you find brown bears and wolves but no black bears).

The sas’s intelligence and stealth - the latter as prominent in the anecdotal literature as its great speed afoot - have allowed it, like the bear and the wolf, to adapt well to forested country. But this is interesting to speculate upon. The sas clearly is seen often enough in open country for the speculation to have merit.

Besides, other than juveniles who appear to be good at it and who are adept at using trees as camouflage, sas can’t (or rather rarely do) climb.

While more regularly seen more closely in forest habitat, I think that those sightings are the result of a creature more suitable to open ground, unable to use its natural ability to identify and avoid us, being caught off guard.

Afterall, who goes hiking across the great plains to go camping? A large brown body in tall grass is naturally seen as a cow, or moose or horse or bison. Our propensity to see things as we think they are would explain how a cryptic creature could be mistaken for the ordinary.

The presumed physiology and size and mobility of what we associate with BF just seems more likely the result of an evolutionary path that would have been wonderfully suited for vast open ground habitat, and while these days the great northern forests dominate what we see as the remaining wilderness, in fact the wide open grasslands supported huge complexes of gigantic animals and comprised the the largest contiguous habitat in the world.