What is Bigfoot?

Bigfoot: Portrait of an Animal That May Not Exist: Sasquatch, Yeti, MoMo, Nape—the creature goes by different names around the world. A sort of pseudoscience has emerged to suss out the biology and behavior of this animal. Here’s what it says.

From Outsideonline.com: The names vary by region and by peoples, but the descriptions are similar enough: a biped with an ape-like gait, roughly the size of a large human, with lots and lots of fur.

People have been spotting Sasquatches or Yetis or Abominable Snowmen for centuries, and legends of these enormous primates populate the myths and fairytales of cultures on nearly every continent. It’s only recently, however, that man has made a study of what Americans usually call Bigfoot. In the decades after Robert Gimlin and Roger Patterson captured their famous footage, cryptozoologists—self-identified scientists who study unproven anthropomorphic animals—and ‘squatch hunters have carried out a Linnaean effort to classify the Bigfoots of the world and create a legitimate Bigfoot taxonomy. The result is a surprisingly clear profile of a creature that may or may not exist.

Note: Nearly all of the following is roundly dismissed by scholars and biologists.1 But that hasn’t stopped generations of Bigfoot experts from soldiering on.

Click here to see the list.