There is enough to take yeti, sasquatch, orang pendek and yowie seriously.

What science should have done, long ago, is adopt maslo63′s attitude on this – and stop the condescension and ignorance that has postponed science’s moving forward on the hairy hominoid question for decades. If sober eyewitnesses make a uniformly powerful case for something, wherever it is, the case has been made; the sneering stops; and research proceeds apace. That’s the way science would work if its practitioners were worthy of it, which on the frontiers of science they largely aren’t. Science is not about the hoarding, dusting off and preservation of a set body of knowledge. It is about expanding that body as fast as practicable. It’s worthless if anything less.

(The duckbilled platypus is pretty implausible: the beak of a duck; the tail of a beaver; and the feet of a beaduck; and it lays eggs. The yowie, compared to that, is Joe next door, even if it is a marsupial. The body plan is so Miocene.)

Zoology has much to learn from astronomy – where amateurs regularly add to the knowledge base, discovering objects that beams of light take from minutes to centuries to reach. Zoology isn’t willing to move in the same direction for what amounts to its own backyard? Sad. That cryptozoology even exists is a blow to the credibility and image of mainstream zoology. It says, loudly: you people aren’t doing your jobs.

If anyone had forwarded the theory in the 1950s that any of us, never mind most of us, had Neandertal DNA he would have been laughed off the stage. Surprise. The single-species hypothesis is deader than a doornail. (Took you long enough.) The ideas that the oldest fossils we have drive all research conclusions, and that animals leagues of which exist as fossils can no longer be here now, nor anything like them – hello, coelacanth! should have put paid to that, and it didn’t – need to follow it pronto.

“Finding Bigfoot” is the leading edge of speculative hominoid research. That isn’t sad? That’s the saddest. Science has – with few courageous exceptions – totally ceded the ground to amateurs, with all that entails. The kids who would clear up the question of sasquatch and yowie are being schooled -with the weight of all society’s laughter behind it – that they are jokes, despite the clear, sober, guidebook-consistent accounts of thousands of people…which could probably be multiplied by dozens, at a minimum, if most who see these animals didn’t quickly realize that the best way to lead a normal life with friends and an income after you do is to shut up.

That’s science? That makes the Spanish Inquisition look like Jeopardy!

The mainstream attitude on this question – as ably pointed out by Bindernagel and Meldrum, although they are nicer than me – amounts to willful stupidity. Come on, guys. See if you can reclaim the field from “Finding Bigfoot.” You’re gonna look really bad if they find it first.

There is no way I would rule out that the Yowie is a marsupial. In fact, that is a question I too have raised here, more than once.

For some reason thought you had gone on that Europe trip you mentioned a while back, my bad.

Believe me, most of the really odd creatures here in Australia belong (reportedly) to the species Homo sapiens…