Finding Bigfoot, er, Yowie
Posted by: Loren Coleman on May 30th, 2012
As you’ve probably heard, Finding Bigfoot is in Australia. Read more here and here.
I couldn’t see too much to be excited about this. Yet.
Reports of audio and other “evidence,” of course, is merely publicity for the program, and we might as well wait for the show to be disappointed when it airs. š
Prove me wrong.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of things to read.
Click on the image above to make the Yowie larger, as seen here on the cover of The Yowie: In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot.
The creature above is a variety of the Yowie seen with a club, as viewed in Harry Trumbore’s drawing from The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates, 2006.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the worldās leading cryptozoologists, some say ātheā leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sandersonās Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Colemanās daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
You can always expect a show that searchs for the unknown to never find anything major, for if they did, it would be all over the news, or they would hype up the episode.
I am not an expert on “Yowie,” and I have always be rather skeptical of it’s existence. So this appears to me to be nothing but a giant boondoggle on the Finding Foot people. That said, you’re talking about a country larger than the continental US with a population less than Orange County, CA. There’s a lot of places a thing could hide, and contrary to popular belief not all of the Australian interior is desert waste.
Oh, and welcome back, Loren.
Naus:
The reasons shows like this never find anything is that TV doesn’t allow the time it takes to actually do that. Of course in the case of FB the cast helps out big time. BFRO, ya got a great database and a lot of good curators. We know that database is legit, ’cause the folks we see on that show would be incapable of making it up.
Mandors:
I used to feel skeptical about the Yowie. Um, OK, I still do. But there are so many assumptions about humankind’s spread across the planet that remained unchallenged until fossils were found directly contradicting them that now I’m not as sure as I once was. That Oz was settled by sea seems to me an increasingly fishy notion. And if it wasn’t…why presume we were the only primate that got there, particularly since the spread would have been from Gigantopithecus’s home base?
Humm, mandors writes:
Where have I been?
I’ve posted something every day and haven’t traveled far from home for most of the winter and all of the spring.
Confused by that comment.
I spent 9 years living in Australia to study the Yowie and had two experiences that could firmly be put as Yowies, i reported both to ` a popular Yowie site ` but apart from the standard automated reply i heard nothing, despite me giving full contact details, names, places etc, i guess there is as much jealousy with Yowies as there is with Sasquatch et al.
I think the chances of something undiscovered living in Australia are even greater than they are in North America. As Mandors points out, larger land mass with significantly less people and we have found all sorts of oddities in Australia so I’d say the chances of finding more odd creatures is quite high. The only negative, theoretically speaking, is that primates really haven’t done too well on that continent, and pretty much everything there is poisonous/venomous. Even the male platypus has a poison spike on his hind legs. I have to wonder what the chances are that Yowie is marsupial, since most mammals that survived there seem to belong to the marsupialia or monotreme orders.
“and pretty much everything there is poisonous/venomous”…well, we have our share but this is somewhat of an overstatement. Kangaroos can and do kick but we have nothing along the lines of bears or native big cats. I won’t mention the infamous “drop bear”.
Believe me, most of the really odd creatures here in Australia belong (reportedly) to the species Homo sapiens…
No worries Loren, I’ll confirm you been here all along! ;p
I read this on Coast to Coast as well and fell for the link which I read assuming there was an actual link to an audio file…..Oops! Shame on me š
Sorry, Loren,
For some reason thought you had gone on that Europe trip you mentioned a while back, my bad.
flame821:
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.
All indigenous mammals of Australia are marsupials so if we presume the Yowie is indigenous then we must also presume that it is a marsupial, yes?
As soon as i heard they had interesting audio, i was suspicious. Australian animals make some pretty strange noises. The Koala and possum make some hellish sounds at night. I hope they did some checking and ruled out our natives before making these claims.
Just listen to the koala, here.
Yes Averagefoot, you are right about that. I find it interesting that some people so supportive of sasquatch are skeptical of the Yowie despite much the same evidence existing for it as for sasquatch. Tracks, eyewitness reports etc. etc. If this same evidence supports the existence of sasquatch should it not do the same for the Yowie? You can’t discount reports in one place that match reports in another just because the place is different! That’s like saying “I’ll believe in your story because you live in Oregon but not this guys because he is from Australia” even though both people are just as confident in what they saw and the evidence is just as good.
As for the Yowie being a marsupial…it would pretty much have to be. But if that is the case it is the most remarkable example of convergent evolution I’ve ever heard of. People are not describing a marsupial, they’re seeing a great ape. If it is not a great ape then what does that say about bigfoot? Could it too be *gasp* cases of mistaken identity for other known animals?
Could Gigantopithecus be the answer? I don’t think we know enough about Gigantopithecus to make that kind of leap in logic. We don’t know if Gigantopithecus was even a biped and being related to orangutans (supposedly) would it have over-sized feet nearly identical to a humans? That would be more convergent evolution and though not impossible it adds to the list of improbabilities on the subject. There are no native placental mammals on Australia save for bats and some rodents and we know how they got there. To think Gigantopithecus made it over somehow would require some damn good evidence nothing short of finding it there.
Regardless. If anyone is to take the evidence for sasquatch seriously they must do the same for any undiscovered bipedal ape in any other part of the world, including as unlikely a place as Australia. If we can assume sasquatch exists so too must the Yowie and that means someone has some explaining to do.
Whether anything is taken seriously depends on the frequency and coherence of the evidence, period.
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.