Try finding any place else on the internet where you can get this kind of discussion on a topic like this. Much less even read about it at all.

Kopite: one-offs need an explanation no less than anything else. It is (OK, was) there. There is no good reason not to find out what it is or how it got there. The location makes a fake simply not a serious consideration; whatever it is, nature put it there. Known animals can be safely ruled out as well; no one has offered compelling evidence to consider that possibility. And Meldrum has shown about as convincingly as can be, I think, that there is good reason to consider both the Cronin and Shipton tracks to be evidence of the same species.

Macrodactyly is no stretch. I googled it and if Shipton is what that is, it’s a pretty mild case from what I saw.

I believe that the bias should always be toward knowing. And these two trackways are unlikely, from everything I know, to be anything other than what it’s being speculated here that they are.

There seems to be a much greater and more consistent volume of evidence for sasquatch. But there is more than enough for yeti to make it a valid scientific target.

“”I think that anything that looks like this, and brought up someone with Shipton’s mountain experience short like this did, needs to be explained away. What is Krantz’s explanation?”"

I don’t think a one off needs to be explained away to any great degree. If it recurred again and again then I would have a different opinion.

Grover Krantz wasn’t talking about anybody else. He was writing that he himself sees no point in taking the Shipton photo so seriously until another footprint or cast of a similar type shows up…….and he never saw any such thing. Neither have I.

If it was a long line of footprints then I’m sure Grover Krantz would have been much more interested. But it wasn’t. It was a one off footprint type that was never repeated ever again. The Cronin photo is clearly not the same. I’m not convinced they are related at all.

I’m trying to get this. I really am.

What’s keeping them? I’ve just heard scientists (and nope, I’m not one either) say the DAMNDEST things about this question.

- One figures they have to be gorillas, eating what gorillas eat;

- Another (more than one, actually) figures they can’t exist because there isn’t…enough…food…? Humans roamed in sasquatch habitat, lots of them, eating what sasquatch are alleged to eat, for eons; there aren’t many humans at all in yeti habitat. (But lots of livestock. Yum.);

- Lots of them ask, where are the bodies? Why has nobody shot one? Then, when confronted with people’s allegations that both things have happened, scoff: impossible! (Not at all, when one thinks about it, or better yet, reads the accounts);

- Lots of them ask, why is no one seeing these? (Er, proponents do this too, unfortunately.) Then, confronted with the volume of sighting reports, scoff: that’s not proof! (No, that’s YOUR job);

- Lots of them ask, where are the fossils? the bones? at the exact same time they’re (1) speculating how many dinosaurs we have yet to find and (2) acknowledging that we probably only have evidence for about 5% – five percent! – of all the primates that ever lived. And (3) scoffing at the idea that there could be any anomalous remains in a box deep in a museum collection somewhere, or serving as some prospector’s doorstop.

Do I have to go on? To help them out, I probably do!

All I’ve done about this is read and think, two things that scientists are supposed to do as part of that, you know, curiosity thing they’re known for.

The thing I find hardest to believe is that when FELLOW SCIENTISTS come out proposing this, they chuckle – or worse – and turn away.

I wish I could understand it, but I can’t.

I feel like a Yankee fan watching A-Rod strike out every time up. Blindfolded. Try taking that thing over your eyes off, son.

So now we have at least 3 examples of cold-tolerant primates – not counting ourselves or, more precisely, the Neandertals – and neither one of us is (I’m assuming) a scientist.

Too bad mainstream science can’t wrap its mind around the concept and at least accept the POSSIBILITY that a great ape could make a go of it in a temperate-to-arctic environment!

P.S. You’re spot-on re ARKive.org.

The Barbary macaque – best known for being the only monkey species in Europe (they’re the ones on Gibraltar) – also winters in high-elevation snowy places.

And of course there is at least one other species of Asiatic monkey – the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey – about which arkive.org says this:

“They inhabit coniferous forest, which is found between 3,000 and 4,500 metres above sea level and experiences frost for around 280 days of the year (2) (3); snow to a depth of over one metre can accumulate (6).”

Arkive.org is, BTW, something no aspiring – or veteran – student of zoology can afford not to have on their favorites list. I chuckle that when I went there to gather this information, what should greet me, first image on the screen, but a snow monkey.

To append your argument, I would add that although no (known) great apes are temperate-to-(ant)artic in their ranges, if you expand the group to include “primates,” then there most certainly is an example: the Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), commonly known as the “Snow Monkey;” residing on the northern islands of Japan in areas where winter snow covers the ground for months each year.

Even when faced with a plausible example, why scientists are so steadfast in their “belief” that a cold-tolerant great ape couldn’t survive is a mystery to me…

I think that anything that looks like this, and brought up someone with Shipton’s mountain experience short like this did, needs to be explained away. What is Krantz’s explanation?

With no alternative, I have to find it humorous when scientists who expect open minds display some of the same characteristics they decry in the mainstream. I know that when one is a cryptid proponent, one needs to Look Skeptical. But I frequently find proponents pulling skeptical triggers that wind up shooting their causes in the foot.

I was once puzzled with how different the Cronin and Shipton tracks appeared. Now that there’s a possible explanation I hadn’t considered before, it’s striking – and compelling – how similar they are.

“Nepal just sounds more remote and exotic than British Columbia to many people.”

That’s the problem. So much of this discussion is about things that people – even those who should know better, like scientists – Just Believe.

It should be about the evidence.

Scientists by and large don’t examine the evidence because Apes Are Tropical. Well, if that’s true, apes are just about THE ONLY KIND OF ANIMAL that doesn’t have both tropical and temperate (usually Arctic/Antarctic as well) representatives. (Unless you count us. We are a whole lot weirder than the sasquatch and yeti.) Why would that be? No good reason. Particularly if the evidence loudly disputes it.

But scientists don’t look at the evidence because they Just Believe Apes Are Tropical.

Various characters and behaviors now considered typical of known great apes were FIRST DOCUMENTED for yeti and sasquatch. How often do we see the behavior of imaginary animals predicting the behavior of real ones? I can’t think of an instance.

Not much remoteness is required for these animals. They appear to like it, but they are on its fringes, where the people tend to be, a lot. (Like other wild animals, including the known apes.) And a lot of people are seeing them.

It’s time for people to stop Just Believing Stuff. (And calling that “skepticism.”)

Including that a primate locomotor specialist like Jeff Meldrum is making track reconstructions based wholly on his imagination, or on the whim of the sun on snow.