Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy

Recently, an article appeared in the Kewanee, Illinois Star-Courier documenting the capture of a black bear (Ursus americanus) near Neponset. It is believed to be the first black bear sighted in the state of Illinois in over 40 years and the first black bear ever caught in the state’s history.

The manner in which the story has unfolded is a familiar one. The wildlife officials in Illinois have automatically assumed that the bear is an escaped pet. Although it is possible that such an assumption is correct, it seems to be an automatic assumption of all wildlife officials in all states when it comes to animals turning up in places outside of their known habitat zones.

In Texas, such assumptions are pervasive among wildlife officials regarding cougar (Puma concolor) and black bear sightings. If no picture, tracks, or other hard evidence is present the officials will invariably claim that the witness was mistaken. If tracks, a photo, or other evidence is present proving that the witness actually did see the cougar or bear, officials will normally state that the animal is merely an “escaped pet.”

Such stock assumptions, in many cases, seem in defiance to reason; however, the basis behind such seemingly unreasonable assumptions and statements may simply boil down to a management/money issue. Official acknowledgement of a species in an area where it was previously not known to inhabit, may indeed ultimately lead to expended resources, time and money that must be devoted to management of that species. Further, certain industries in a region may fear that they could be adversely impacted by the discovery of threatened or endangered species.

If the sasquatch were documented it would more than likely have to be considered endangered or, at the very least, threatened. Those who would be likely tasked with implementing such a management plan may be less than enthusiastic at that prospect. Developers and the timber industry would probably not welcome the news. These industries have historically had a powerful voice.

It is possible that the Illinois wildlife officials are right; the black bear captured there may very well be an escaped pet or captive. However, just once, it would be sweet and welcome music for a wildlife official to say, “We have no idea where this guy came from, but we intend to find out.”

Source: Star-Courier.

On February 12, 2009, the world observes the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. By any accounting, Darwin must be included with the most influential thinkers in the history of science. The young naturalist’s five-year voyage on HMS Beagle gave him an extraordinary opportunity to examine rich fossil beds and explore the diversity of life on many distant shores. Upon his return to England, Darwin spent the next forty-plus years contemplating his observations and writing books on a variety of subjects, including a four-volume set based on his eight-year study of the natural history and classification of barnacles, sessile marine crustaceans living in shallow water. In 1859 he published his landmark work, often abbreviated as On the Origin of Species. Contrary to popular opinion, the seminal premise presented in his book was not the concept or theory of evolution; the idea of descent with modification had been discussed for centuries. Darwin proposed a process, natural selection, by which populations might change. It continues to represent a central tenet of biology.

As almost any schoolchild can relate, variation in the beaks of Darwin’s finches, birds living on the Galápagos Islands, is one of the most prominently portrayed examples illustrating the influence of natural selection. Interestingly, at the time of his visit to the islands, Darwin was not overly concerned with the birds, which were largely collected by his servant, and comprehended little evolutionary significance to their characteristics until they had been studied by ornithologist John Gould. Gould’s opinions regarding the number of species collected and their relatedness surprised Darwin and played an important part in the formulation of his ideas regarding species change and differentiation and, by 1839, the full development of his concept of natural selection.

Initially, the publication of Darwin’s views regarding the role of natural selection in evolutionary change received only modest support from the scientific community, although this response is seldom acknowledged in contemporary assessments. Indeed, as noted by Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr in his introduction to a facsimile edition of On the Origin of Species, more papers were published in opposition to Darwin’s ideas in the first fifty years following its appearance than in support of it.

Although little appreciated now, Darwin’s work represented a radical departure from the approach and methods traditionally used by scientists. For example, his arguments were placed entirely outside the purview of the opinions of philosophers. According to Mayr, this was almost unthinkable, if not unforgivable, stating, “No other work advertised to the world the emancipation of science from philosophy as blatantly as did Darwin’s Origin.” In addition, Darwin used a model-making strategy, revolutionary for its time but commonly employed today, whereby experiments are used to test the validity of concepts or hypotheses. Even without his ideas regarding natural selection, these two achievements alone represent significant contributions to the advancement of science.

Textbooks and popular treatments often portray the church as rising up in opposition to Darwin’s Origin of Species and his (perceived) attack on faith. Mayr notes that, through much of the nineteenth century, evolutionary concepts actually appealed most strongly to laymen. Darwin’s target audience was his scientific peers, not the church. Mayr insists that Darwin went to great lengths to avoid offending people of faith. Indeed, as documented in his book The Post Darwinian Controversies (1981), author James R. Moore states that many of Darwin’s strongest supporters and most attentive correspondents, those “who most readily accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection,” were Protestant ministers and Christian laymen, men who would today characterize themselves as conservatives, evangelicals, and even fundamentalists (Aulie, 1982). In some ways Darwin’s ideas regarding the equality of all the human races, as presented in his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, mirrored the monogenesis beliefs of Christian abolitionists, standing in stark contrast to the theories of mainstream anthropologists and other influential scientists of the day, who considered some races inferior and argued for the separate creation as distinct species of the races of mankind.

Still, one cannot deny that some religionists objected strongly to Darwin’s writings. Mayr concluded that “nearly all the denunciations of Darwin’s ideas on natural selection were based on an incomplete knowledge of the Origin and on misunderstanding,” but concern or outright rejection of evolutionary concepts grew to be widespread among laymen in the twentieth century. On the other hand, with the integration of Mendelian genetics into Darwin’s take on evolutionary change, acceptance by scientists of this “synthesis” became pervasive and was seen as a way to unify the branches of biology and anthropology, in addition to other fields of science.

In the U.S. the focus of these disparate viewpoints came to rest in the public school arena. Laws and/or standards were adopted in some states that served to limit the teaching of naturalistic evolution. Other states, including Texas, adopted more generalized policies encouraging discussion of various perspectives regarding scientific theories as well as their problems and weaknesses. Many opponents viewed such policies as encouraging faith-based perspectives. In response, legal and scientific organizations fought back with increasing success to eliminate any kind of religious reference or activity in the public schools, based primarily on the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution.

In January 2009 the Texas State Board of Education met to review science standards, a process undertaken every ten years. The National Center for Science Education, an institution dedicated to “defending the teaching of evolution in public schools,” spearheaded the effort to eliminate the “strengths and weaknesses” clause from the current standards. NCSE executive director Dr. Eugenie Scott argued that requiring students to critique the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories would lead to the adoption of “textbooks that contain pseudoscience and inaccuracies,” causing Texas students to suffer as a result. The recommended wording under consideration states, “The student is expected to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing.”

The new recommended wording certainly appears to retain the ability of students to examine possible weaknesses of theories, including naturalistic evolution, as they “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations.” The greater concern is the apparent attitude of proponents for change that seems to imply that it is not possible for theories or “scientific explanations” to have problems. For example, Kevin Fisher, a past president of the Science Teachers Association of Texas, said the “strengths and weaknesses” language is “an attempt to bring false weaknesses into the classroom.” David M. Hillis, a University of Texas biology professor added, “Every single thing they are representing as a weakness is a misrepresentation of science … These are science skeptics. These are people with religious and political agendas.”

While acknowledging for the sake of argument the possibility that misguided skeptics have attempted to undermine education in Texas, one should not presume to suggest that the scientific enterprise is perfect. There are weaknesses in some, probably most, scientific explanations. Although practitioners in all fields of knowledge may tend toward intellectual imperialism, scientific knowledge should never be confused with truth. Scientists pursue truth, but explanations for observations should always be seen as tentative. Little pleases a scientist more than disproving some aspect of the work of another scientist.

Science is a process. Charles Darwin is acknowledged as a great scientist, but not all of his ideas stood the test of time, or more importantly, stood up to testing. Pangenesis, his proposal for a hereditary mechanism and part of his effort to describe population variation, was an erroneous explanation. Darwin’s theory was discarded while Gregor Mendel’s superior model for variation and inheritance was eventually accepted. Teachers do their students a service when they encourage critical analysis of theories and illustrate how paradigms shift or are discarded over time in the wake of new discoveries. Even natural selection, the dependable old saw of evolutionary processes, has shown some explanatory weaknesses.

Recently, for example, researchers at Uppsala University suggested that a nonadaptive process (i.e., unrelated to natural selection) “has made a significant contribution to human evolution.” Many human genes appear to have evolved rapidly; the “process increases the rate at which certain mutations spread through a population.” Matthew Webster, one of the authors, concluded, “The research not only increases our understanding of human evolution, but also suggests that many techniques used by evolutionary biologists to detect selection may be flawed.” Would proponents of the Texas proposed standards object to this portrayal of the weakness or insufficiency of natural selection as an explanatory process in human evolution?

Clearly, controversy can stimulate scholarship, so long as it is partnered with a genuine openness to the unforeseen. Eugenie Scott, of the aforementioned National Center for Science Education, recently propounded on the subject of Bigfoot and Other Wild Men of the Forest. One portion of her talk concerned the question, “Could Bigfoot Live in Texas?” Some of her comments may relate to a perspective regarding the primacy of scientific knowledge.

For example, at one point in her Texas-related comments, Scott said, “If you’re going to look scientifically at bigfoot” the first question you want to ask is, ‘How do these observations fit with everything else we know from science?’” While this may sound logical, it hearkens back to the conflict Darwin encountered in emancipating the scientific process from previously stated opinions of philosophers. Certainly scientists should be familiar with the applicable research of their fields, but if they deliberately discredit observations that run counter to prevailing wisdom, progress would never take place.

Near the conclusion of her presentation, Clark made another interesting comment: “And like I say, either bigfoot exists, or we have to throw out an awful lot of our knowledge of natural history.” It seems reasonable to infer that what she meant to imply was that, if the sasquatch or bigfoot exists, scientists would have to rewrite much of what is currently understood regarding natural history. However, taken as presented in the context of an either/or choice, such dichotomies have little applicability in scientific discourse, whether they come from scientists or young Earth creationists. Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, writing in Wonderful Life, argued that such choices should be avoided and indicated that, “More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.” Just because one is presented with two options does not mean that either of the options is correct or that no other options exist.

Fortunately, scientists don’t have to choose between “Either the sasquatch exists and we have to throw out what we know about natural history, or the sasquatch doesn’t exist and we are safe in our preconceptions” (as we might rephrase Scott’s dichotomy). In spite of the efforts of the media or some skeptics to disparage or sensationalize the subject, at its root the sasquatch phenomenon simply appears to be derived from the presence of a rare and reclusive bipedal primate. The ecological and biological and anthropological sciences will continue to flourish when and if the sasquatch is ever documented.

In the meantime, the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy will continue to pursue its mission and documentation efforts. Part of that mission includes education. TBRC speakers have been privileged to give presentations in a variety of settings, including universities and public schools. Students benefit when they are exposed to and participate in the free exchange of knowledge and ideas. Educators should be granted academic freedom and trusted to act responsibly in pursuing goals of scholarship. The TBRC welcomes the opportunity to continue to play a small part in that process.

Without question, science plays an important role in society. Many historians maintain that modern science is a product of the Protestant Reformation. In the spirit of the reformers, modern science is shaped and driven by controversy and the questioning of standing precepts. As exemplified by Charles Darwin and his Christian correspondents, science, as a way of knowing, should not be seen as a threat to faith, properly understood. Science education should embrace this legacy and encourage students, in as many ways as possible, to pursue wonder, curiosity, discovery, and the exploration of the unknown. It is an exciting enterprise.

Sources:

Aulie, Richard P. (1982). The Post-Darwinian Controversies: An Extended Book Review Essay (Pt. 1). Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation. March, 24-29.

Gould, Stephen Jay. (1989). Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W. W. Norton and Co.

Mayr, Ernst. (1964). In: Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition with an Introduction by Ernst Mayr. Atheneum reprint (Harvard University Press).

Moore, James R. (1981). The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900. Cambridge University Press.

Natural selection is not alone in driving evolution.

What’s next for Texas science standards?

Eugenie C. Scott, PhD, a resident of Berkeley, California, is president of the Bay Area Skeptics organization and serves as the executive director of the National Center for Science Education. She formerly taught as a physical anthropologist at the University of Kentucky, the University of Colorado, and at California State University, Hayward. She was also a board member of the now defunct International Society of Cryptozoology. Scott is best known for her decades-long opposition to allowing creationism or other alternatives to standard evolutionary theory to be taught in public schools.

On January 13, 2009, the Ask a Scientist lecture series featured Scott speaking on Bigfoot and Other Wild Men of the Forest. Part of her talk, given in San Francisco, CA, was excerpted and made available through FORA.tv. It is entitled Could Bigfoot Live in Texas?

TBRC transcript of Dr. Scott’s comments:

One thing you want to consider is where do these creatures live? Well, they live all over the place. There’s a Texas bigfoot group and they have marked where bigfoot has been spotted, they claim, in Texas. You can find maps like this for virtually any state in the country. Bigfoot appears not just in the Pacific Northwest and in northern California, which is where we’re used to thinking about bigfoot as Californians, they occur in Nebraska and in the Ozarks and in the Appalachians and Texas, not too far from Austin, apparently, from the looks of this one map.

So, okay, if they live all over the place, does that make it less likely or more likely that they really exist? I would suggest that it probably makes it less likely, because if you’re a very large mammal you’re probably going to be fairly specialized to a, well, not overly specialized, not like a koala bear or something like that, but there’s going to be a certain limitation to the kinds of environments that you can live in.

One thing, consider a large-bodied primate like a gorilla. Now gorillas live in a tropical environment. Yeah, some of the bigfoot, you know, some of the “Big Guys” live in tropical environments, but most of them are reported from temperate environments, and western Texas is not a tropical environment. Okay? Gorillas live in tropical environments, they have to take in, given their body size, they have to take in something like eight or nine thousand calories a day. They tend not to eat very calorie-rich food. A gorilla eats mostly leaves and shoots, the fruits when they can get it, nuts if they can get it, but they’re mostly folivores, they’re mostly leaf eaters, and a gorilla will spend something like half of his waking hours eating.

Now you go to, you see the movies on National Geographic and so forth of gorillas, they’ve got these big guts? Reason for that. Because they have to keep eating constantly, almost constantly, in order to get enough calories to keep that big bulk going. And the kind of food they tend to eat, leaves tend to be not very high calorie foods, and because that’s the major component of their diet, they tend to really have to eat a whole lot.

Okay, what is there to eat in western Texas that would be comparable, that, to keep alive a really big mammal like that? Those are the kinds of questions you need to ask if you’re going to look scientifically at bigfoot. Because, the first question you want to ask is, “How do these observations fit with everything else we know from science?” Okay. If we know from science that big-bodied primates have to eat a lot of food, then what does that tell you about the carrying capacity of the environment?

TBRC Response:

It’s interesting to observe in Scott’s anti-creationism writings how she criticizes the use of misinformation and the way creationist arguments “frequently promote severe misunderstandings.” In the case of her recent Ask a Scientist presentation, she appears to have taken a page from the playbook of those she most fervently impugns.

Although Scott’s bigfoot presentation is rife with factual errors and misrepresentations, she does make a seemingly valid point regarding the distribution of sighting reports. It is difficult to satisfactorily explain, for example, how forty-plus sasquatch reports for New Jersey are plausible, as reported by some organizations. North, south, east and west, sasquatch sightings seem to come from every part of the continent, representing every available climate and habitat type.

It is probably reasonable to surmise that a large percentage of reported alleged encounters or observations were not properly investigated and vetted. Nevertheless, when citing data or information from another source, that information should be understood and presented in the proper context. Concluding that sasquatches “live all over the place” only serves to misrepresent the fact that the vast majority of alleged sasquatch observations occur in or near heavily forested and sparsely populated areas.

As far as Texas and neighboring states are concerned, the TBRC has consistently endeavored to point out the manifest correlations regarding ecological factors and the distribution of reported sasquatch encounters. One of the first problems to note in terms of Scott’s presentation is that, contrary to what she repeatedly implied, the vast majority of the alleged bigfoot encounters in Texas arise from the far eastern third of the state, not the western part.

Anyone familiar with Texas on an elementary level knows that the state is vast and is comprised of perhaps the most diverse set of ecological zones of any state. While far west Texas has much in common with the southern part of Arizona, much of East Texas is an ecological clone of Louisiana, being comprised of millions of acres of dense pine and hardwood forests and nearly innumerable lakes, rivers, bayous, sloughs and creeks, sustained by high annual rainfall.

Scott’s emphasis on West Texas is particularly puzzling considering that she included a Texas sightings distribution map in her presentation. The map clearly illustrates that reported bigfoot encounters in that part of the state are few and far between, but Scott neglected to point this out. Had she delved more carefully into the data, surely she would have learned that even those few purported encounters from the western half of Texas are correlated with rivers or other bodies of water, dense riparian vegetation, and sparse human populations. As the TBRC has repeatedly stated, the overall distribution pattern indicates an ecological correlation supportive of the existence of a living species.

While Scott censures the “bad science” of creationists, she should be mindful of the need for accuracy and reasonableness when presenting oneself as an authority on any given subject. She repeatedly referenced the food habits and habitat preferences of gorillas, presumably lowland gorillas, with the unstated but understood assumption that bigfoot ecology must be comparable. There is simply no way to know this. Witness reports, on the contrary, suggest that sasquatch ecology may be closer to that of the orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), especially in terms of its seemingly solitary nature, while its apparently omnivorous food habits, based on witness observations, are more in line with the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).

Scott astutely points out that western Texas is not a tropical environment, but she neglects to add that eastern Texas is analogous in many ways to environments that support wild great ape populations. There is absolutely nothing of an ecological nature that would preclude the possibility of large primates existing in the extensive forests found in eastern Texas and adjacent states. As an example, Chimp Haven, a major chimpanzee refuge located in Northwest Louisiana, was established in that locale because “the climate and ecology in this area are optimal for the chimpanzees.” Indeed, in some of the least accessible and densely forested parts of East Texas and Louisiana, rumors have persisted to the present day of lingering feral primate troops, reportedly the progeny of captives that escaped into the swamps and woods. Whether or not these escapees still exist, the environment is perfectly capable of supporting large populations of large omnivorous species, including coyotes (Canis latrans), wild hogs (Sus scrofa), and black bears (Ursus americanus). Implying that the sasquatch is unlikely to exist because of a lack of available food is misleading, at best.

Although Scott’s argument that a large primate could not exist in western Texas is largely irrelevant in terms of the case she was attempting to make, it should be noted that large animals such as the American black bear (U. americanus) and the mountain lion (Puma concolor) do live in western Texas. Indeed, various species of large mammals survive in much harsher environments around the world. Her contention that large mammals “are probably going to be fairly specialized” and thus limited in their environmental options is simply erroneous. Some animals are quite generalized in terms of their habitat preferences. The largest mammal in Africa can live in woodlands, savannah, or harsh deserts, and in North America adaptable species such as the coyote (C. latrans), white-tailed deer (Virginiana odocoileus), mountain lion (P. concolor), and grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horriblis) (historically) exploit a wide variety of habitats.

Everyone has a right to an opinion, but the value of an opinion is reduced if weak or misleading arguments are employed. Regardless of one’s education and background, it is still incumbent on a scientist to ensure that, before giving a public presentation, a little homework is done. While the TBRC doesn’t agree with many of Dr. Scott’s propositions, the fact that a respected scientist has addressed some aspects of the sasquatch phenomenon, even if superficially and speciously, is hopefully indicative of a willingness on the part of others to consider the possibility of an as yet undocumented large rare primate living in secluded pockets of North America.

Sources:

Ask a Scientist: Could Bigfoot Live in Texas? Featuring Dr. Eugenie Scott.

Chimp Haven.

Coates, Leroy. (1985). Bigfoot Roams the Woods Near Columbia, True Stories from the Louisiana Bayou People, Book II. Century Publishing, Abbeville, Louisiana.

Coleman, Loren. (1983). Mysterious America. Faber and Faber, London and Boston.

Colyer, Daryl G., edited by Alton Higgins. (2005, revised in 2007). Bigfoot/Sasquatch Sightings: Correlations to Annual Rainfall Totals, Waterways, Human Population Densities and Black Bear Habitat Zones. Online article.

Gunter, Pete, photography by Roy Hamric. (1971). The Big Thicket: A Challenge for Conservation. Jenkins Publishing Company, Austin and New York.

Gould Ecoregions of Texas map (.pdf). Provided by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Sourced from: Gould, F.W., Hoffman, G.O., and Rechenthin, C.A. (1960). Vegetational Areas of Texas, Texas A&M University. Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Leaflet No. 492 (modified by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department).

Green, John. (1978). Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us. (The Rainfall Correlation Hypothesis). Cheam Publishing, Ltd, Agassiz, B.C., Canada.

Hensley, Dempsie. (1967). The Big Thicket Story. Texian Press, Waco, Texas.

Higgins, Alton. (2008). Could Bigfoot Live Here? Public presentation sponsored by 2008 Texas Bigfoot Conference at Jefferson ISD, Jefferson, Texas.

Natural Regions of Texas map (.pdf). Provided by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department GIS Lab. Sourced from Preserving Texas’ Natural Heritage. LBJ School of Public Affairs Policy Research Project Report 31, 1978.

Natural Subregions of Texas map (.pdf). Provided by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department GIS Lab. Sourced from Preserving Texas’ Natural Heritage. LBJ School of Public Affairs Policy Research Project Report 31, 1978.

Nature: Desert Elephants. Online video link provided by Teacher’s Domain.

Precipitation in Texas map (.pdf). Texas Parks and Wildlife Department GIS Lab.

Riggs, Rob. (2001). In the Big Thicket: On the Trail of the Wildman. Paraview Press, New York, NY.

Scott, Dr. Eugenie. (2008). Why It’s Wrong to Teach Creationism in Schools.

TBRC Report Explorer. Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy.

Texas River Basins, Major Bays and Streams map (.pdf). Texas Parks and Wildlife Department GIS Lab.

The Vegetation Types of Texas map (.pdf). Texas Parks and Wildlife Department GIS Lab.

Woolheater, Craig. (2002, revised in 2004). Bigfoot in Texas? Online article.

Lately it seems that every other month brings forth new enlightenment about great ape behavior. With each new and exciting observation, a question comes to mind: “What next?”

The answer may lie in the thousands of reports of alleged bigfoot encounters.

In a paper published this month in Primates, Dr. Serge Wich, Dr. Karyl Swartz and Dr. Rob Shumaker; Madeleine E. Hardus and Adriano R. Lameira, doctoral candidates at the Utrecht University in The Netherlands; and Erin Stromberg, an animal caretaker at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., reveal new documentation of a non-human primate mimicking a sound from another species without being specifically trained to do so. Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan living at the National Zoo, began whistling after hearing the animal caretaker make the sound. The authors of the paper go on to provide anecdotal information regarding Indah, another orangutan observed whistling.

The documentation of such behavior is obviously an extremely important discovery; its implications for the study of great apes’ learning capacities in the auditory domain cannot be understated. But perhaps even more fascinating, and most certainly overlooked by mainstream scientists, is the fact that the mimicking and whistling behavior of the orangutans can now be added to a growing list of other great ape behavioral traits that have long been ascribed to the putative sasquatch.

The list of such behaviors that were previously reported by alleged bigfoot observers includes swimming, throwing rocks and/or vegetation (limbs, branches, nuts, pine cones), fishing, eating omnivorously, carrying and eating swine, intimidation displays, marking trails, eating fish, building nests, making loud vocalizations, whistling, mimicking, among others. Such descriptions, when attributed to the sasquatch, were always greeted with derision and cynicism; however, it is now clear that these descriptions have been uncannily accurate suggestions of great ape behavior. The more we learn about great apes, the less incredible alleged sasquatch behavior becomes, especially when realizing that such descriptions of sasquatch behavior came long before such behavior was documented in the known great apes.

For clues to what other behavioral traits may be observed in the future regarding great apes, perhaps a crash course in bigfoot sighting reports is the first order of business.

Sources: Great Ape Trust of Iowa; Great Ape Trust of Iowa (video of whistling orangutan); Primates: A Case of Spontaneous Acquisition of a Human Sound by an Orangutan.