Those who suggest Patterson’s film is a hoax usually point to the illustrations in his self-published book on the sasquatch, issued before his film, to show he had the imagination to create a sasquatch for a film. I think it would be profitable to look at how sasquatch/bigfoot was presented prior to his film to see if he used such images for inspiration.

Doubters of Patterson’s film point out that it appears to be based on the Roe account and scenario. However, the Roe creature, as drawn by his daughter, does not have a sagittal crest. Patterson’s sasquatch does have a sagittal crest and I have argued that he used a modified gorilla suit with sagittal crest and he found this acceptable because the yeti was popularly conceived as similarly gorilla like and the sasquatch was “America’s Abominable Snowman”.

Now if we look at Sanderson’s illustrations of “snowman” and sasquatch, pictures that Patterson must have been familiar with as a bigfoot enthusiast, we see an artist’s conception of a “snowman” that resembles Patterson’s bigfoot in heft and conical head. The Ostman bigfoot drawing is unlike the creature in Patterson’s film: its head is more bulbous than conical. I have mentioned this in another post.

Now, let’s look at an artist’s conception of Roe’s account (found in Sanderson’s book, as well as in a previous post by Atomic, and was the artwork illustrating Sanderson’s True Magazine piece on the Roe sighting).

In this picture, we find a striding sasquatch, but one not exactly a match for Roe’s daughter’s picture. It’s head is more rounded and not as flat as in Roe’s daughter’s picture. But what really caught my attention was the creature’s upper back in the Sanderson article picture It was heavily muscled, even rippling.

I rechecked Roe’s account and looked again at his daughter’s drawing. The heavily muscled upper back does not exist in Roe’s account or in his daughter’s reproduction of his sasquatch. It appears, then, that the artist’s conception which accompanied Sanderson’s original article, took liberties with the sasquatch image as supplied by Roe’s account. The artist added a heavily muscled upper back based on his imagination.

This is significant, I think, because Patterson’s bigfoot, while following the Roe scenario, actually possesses a heavily muscled upper back similar to an artist’s illustration of Roe’s account. In short, he slipped up by copying an artist’s rendering. The rippled upper back exists, as far as I know, only in an artist’s imaginative drawing and in Patterson’s reconstruction. A coincidence?

In so doing, my point was to try to explain or understand why Patterson created the image he did. I did not suggest that sagittal crests on Patterson’s Bigfoot precluded its reality. Rather, I was trying to ascertain WHY his creature had sagittal crests, if it was fake. How did he come up with THAT image?

While Sasquatch/Bigfoot images prior to Patterson possessed what could be interpreted as sagittal crests, I think one could just as well make the case that some images possessed a “cave man’ sloping head or monkey shape head.
(I am working on memory here: the image in Sanderson’s book referred to by Loren above, I remember as looking more gibbon like, than great ape like.)

The 1950′s were the peak years of interest in the Yeti, or “abominable snowman”. This may be significant in relation to beliefs and conceptions concerning Bigfoot. When Sanderson and later Patterson first wrote about Sasquatch/Bigfoot, and in numerous other articles, there were always references to “America’s Abominable Snowman”.
(Nowadays, one is likely to find references to the Yeti as a “Bigfoot like” animal or cryptid).

Popular conceptions of the Yeti during the 50′s and 60′s represented the cryptid sometimes as a gorilla-like bipedal ape (or, at least, more gorilla-like than the other giant ape, the orangutan.) I think that Patterson was probably very interested in the Yeti story and it added to his enthusiasm for the legend of the Sasquatch. And it may have influenced his conception of Bigfoot.

I don’t think some of Patterson’s Bigfoot drawings show sagittal crests (this may be an eye of the beholder thing). Others do but look decidedly Yeti like (as popularly conceived).

Why did Patterson go with the Yeti like look for his manufactured Bigfoot? One answer :he used a modified gorilla suit that possessed a phony sagittal crest. It probably never occurred to him that some folks would find fault with this representation of Bigfoot for the very reason of the crest (the criticism: his animal was an unlikely admixture of human and gorilla traits).

I do not put this view forward with the same certainty that Loren apparently enjoys with his Paranthropus hypothesis. I only offer it as something to think about.

What you said.

(I love giving my fingers an occasional rest.)

I want to know what the critter is, but first if it exists. Once we’re over that hump, Paranthropus seems as likely a possibility as any.

Size can range from over 8 feet down to 3 feet for Sapiens.

Why might this not be true for anthropoid apes?

The Bili chimps are a good example. Large size leading to sagital crests even though they are genetically chimps.

Some websites claim p.r. was no more than 4ft. tall (the sites that link paranthropus with astralopithecus), while others talk about a height of 8 ft., but those are the sites which link Paranthropus with Meganthropus.

A little help please?

Loren has shown us here that other early hominids had sagittal crests in both sexes and this makes sense. If you consider that the main purpose of these crests is to increase the surface area for jaw muscles to attach and thereby increase biting power, why should it only be males that would develop this feature? Why couldn’t females be privy to the advantages of a strong bite too? If evolutionary circumstances required strong chewing power from them, there is no reason that I can see why females of the species should not develop this adaptation. It seems to be a survival trait that would not necessarily be favored by one sex over the other.

In Ivan T. Sanderson’s 1961 book, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, you will find him indicating he is hearing reports of Bigfoot where writes, in “each case, a tall, very heavily built, man-shaped creature with bullet-head and bull-neck, and clothed all over in long shiny black hair, with very long arms, short legs and big hands, is said suddenly to have appeared on the bank of a river in which the party was quietly fishing.” (p. 44)

Sanderson, in discussing the four Sasquatch seen by Albert Ostman, writing about the “young male,” notes: “He had wide jaws and a narrow, sloping forehead. The back of the head, as in all of them, apparently rose four or five inches above the brow-line, and was pointed.” (p. 59)

As you can see from the Sanderson drawing of the Ostman Sasquatch (fig. 41 in his 1961 book) and the William Roe drawing, the Sasquatch sagittal crest is evident. Both of these sightings and their appearance in the literature, of course, predate the Patterson-Gimlin footage.

When Patterson made his drawing of the female that Ostman had seen (below), he reflected the upturned curl of hair along the browridge that Sanderson thought was there – and the sagittal crest.

Is there a curl of hair along the browridge in the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot?

You may recall that in creating Willow Creek’s redwood trunk carved Bigfoot, Jim McClarin put this same curl of hair on his Bigfoot sculpture.

I’ll try to make my previous comments perfectly clear. Portrayals of Bigfoot seemed more Yeti like after Patterson’s film. In fact, his Bigfoot seemed more physically similiar to images of the Yeti (with sagittal crest) found in ON THE TRAIL OF UNKNOWN ANIMALS and ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN. LEGEND COME TO LIFE rather than Sasquatch sketches by Roe or Ostman, or some of his own sketches, and True Magazine illustrations of Sanderson’s Jerry Crew account. (An aside: looking at foot prints alone, the Yeti seems more apelike than Bigfoot).

Now, I attribute this to the real possibility that Patterson worked with a modified gorilla suit (with phony, but representational sagittal crest). This is not a mere guess on my part, but according to statements by a man who claimed to wear the suit and another man who claimed he sold the suit to Patterson (if their stories are incorporated, rather than presented as contradictions).

I can only leave it to others to decide if this is more or less plausible than the notion that Patterson filmed a surviving paranathropus.