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Idaho Professor To Hunt Bigfoot With Drones Jeff Meldrum, an anthropologist at Idaho State University, is spending $200,000 to scan the Cascades with drones. The unmanned aircraft will use thermal imaging equipment to peer through thick forest in search of Sasquatch. "We're simply asking a biological question: Is there a species of primate behind the legend of Sasquatch?" he said. Other professors in the field have called any questions about Bigfoot a “waste of time.”

I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

A mysterious and potentially grisly find by two young boys in a wooded area has police and residents of Quincy, Mass., baffled. According to the Patriot Ledger newspaper, “On March 29, Sgt. Steven Leanues picked up what appears to be a decomposed foot that the boys found in the woods off Pantheon Road. Police Chief Frank Alvilhiera sent it to the medical examiner, who determined it is not human, although it appears to have five toes.” Tests are still being conducted, but the strange find has locals asking: What has five toes and looks like a foot — but isn’t?...

An ancient global warming event shrunk the earliest horses down to the size of scrawny housecats, according to new research that could have implications for what mammals might look like in a future warming world. During what's known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, about 56 million years ago, a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans boosted average global temperatures by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 degrees Celsius) over 175,000 years. Mammals responded to this climate change by shrinking, with about one-third of species getting smaller. Now, new research reveals that these changes occurred in lockstep...

US brewer offers $1m Bigfoot reward US brewer Olympia Beer is offering US $1 million for “the safe return of “Bigfoot”. The year-long contest has started in “an effort to highlight the proud histories of both Bigfoot and Olympia Beer in the [US] Northwest”. The grand prize of $1m, will be paid to any person who finds “irrefutable evidence” of Bigfoot’s existence in compliance with the contest’s official rules. The brewer has joined forces with Bigfoot experts at The Falcon Project for the contest, which promises to be one of the most comprehensive searches for the mysterious beast. Evan and...

Since its daredevil landing on Mars last summer, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been avidly exploring its new home in Gale Crater. But there’s been one worry that several people have voiced since Curiosity launched — what if the rover contaminates the surface of Mars with Earth life? Mars and Earth are very different places. Earth’s butterscotchy little brother is a dry and gelid little world. Among its other hazards are surface pressures approaching 1000 times lower than at Earth’s sea level, temperatures which can be low enough to freeze carbon dioxide, and practically no oxygen. Full of curiosity of their...

File this under: What don’t we know?We just discovered slice “2″ is alive.  |1 – Continental crust | 2 -Oceanic crust | 3 – Upper Mantle | 4 – Lower Mantle | 5 – Outer Core | 6 – Inner Core | Image Credit: Dake You might have thought that photosynthetic life forms had the Earth covered, but according to some researchers the largest ecosystem on Earth was just discovered and announced last Thursday, and it’s powered by hydrogen, not photosynthesis.The Oceanic Crust is the rocky hard part under the mud that lies under the ocean. It covers 60% of...

Camels get their humps from giant ancestors which roamed the Arctic rather than the desert and stored fat on their back to help them survive polar conditions, researchers claim.New fragments of leg bone discovered in the far north of Canada suggest that modern camels are descended from ancestors which lived within the Arctic Circle. Thirty fossilised pieces of a lower leg bone belonging to a camel which lived 3.5 million years ago were found by researchers on Ellesmere Island, in Canada's High Arctic. The giant mammals would likely have measured up to 3.5m (11ft) in height and had one hump...

A phallus-shaped worm that lived 505 million years ago is heads above the rest—it’s a “missing link” between two lineages of acorn worms, a new study says. Dubbed Spartobranchus tenuis, the odd creature is a type of soft-bodied marine animal that’s rarely preserved in the fossil record. The new specimen was first discovered in the early 1900s in an area called the Burgess Shale, a fossil-rich area in Canada‘s Yoho National Park.But the fossil went mostly unnoticed until a few years ago, when evolutionary biologist Jean-Bernard Caron of the University of Toronto “stumbled on drawers full of these worms” at...

Roughly 150 million years ago, birds began to evolve. The winged creatures we see in the skies today descended from a group of dinosaurs called theropods, which included tyrannosaurs, during a 54-million-year chunk of time known as the Jurassic period. Why the ability to fly evolved in some species is a difficult question to answer, but scientists agree that wings came to be because they must have been useful: they might have helped land-based animals leap into the air, or helped gliding creatures who flapped their arms produce thrust. As researchers continue to probe the origin of flight, studies of...

Enlarge Image Whack here. By taking great care to eliminate possible contamination of rock samples -- including sterilizing the outer surfaces of rocks and then removing their outer layers to expose fresh material within—researchers found the strongest evidence yet that microbes live deep within the sea floor. Credit: Jesper Rais/AU Communication Samples drilled from 3.5-million-year-old seafloor rocks have yielded the strongest evidence yet that a variety of microorganisms live deeply buried within the ocean's crust. These microbes make their living by consuming methane and sulfate compounds dissolved in the mineral-rich waters flowing through the immense networks of fractures in...

A tiny, furry-tailed creature is the most complete picture yet as to what the ancestor of mice, elephants, lions, tigers, bears, whales, bats and humans once looked like, researchers say. These new findings also suggest this forerunner of most mammals appeared shortly after the catastrophe that ended the age of dinosaurs, scientists added.

Last year, the team drilled through almost 4km (2.34 miles) of ice to reach the lake and retrieve samples. Vostok is thought to have been cut off from the surface for millions of years. This has raised the possibility that such isolated bodies of water might host microbial life forms new to science. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laboratory at the St Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "We are calling this life form unclassified...

The huge ocean sloshing beneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa likely makes its way to the surface in some places, suggesting astronomers may not need to drill down deep to investigate it, a new study reports. Scientists have detected chemicals on Europa's frozen surface that could only come from the global liquid-water ocean beneath, implying the two are in contact and potentially opening a window into an environment that may be capable of supporting life as we know it. "We now have evidence that Europa's ocean is not isolated — that the ocean and the surface talk to...

Explanation: Is this an alien? Probably not, but of all the animals on Earth, the tardigrade might be the best candidate. That's because tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations. The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA...

Russian scientists believe they have found a wholly new type of bacteria in the mysterious subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on Thursday. The samples obtained from the underground lake in May 2012 contained a bacteria which bore no resemblance to existing types, said Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," he said. "We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he...

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a... mythical creature? One Oklahoma man believes that's exactly what he managed to photograph. Craig Martin recently captured three images of an animal he thinks could be a Chupacabra, a legendary species rumored to feed on the blood of goats. The pictures show the animal feasting on the carcass of a dead animal, and even captures the face of the animal. To Martin, it's a match for the elusive prowler. "It looks exactly the same, there's not much difference at all," Martin told 2NEWS affiliate KFOR in Oklahoma City. While the scavenger does...

1959 memo lists government regulations for Yeti hunting. Really. If you're planning to hit the Himalayas in search of an Abominable Snowman, you better be ready to do things by the book. At least, that'd be the case if you were conducting your search in 1959. These days, if you head out in search of a Yeti, you'll probably get a lot of giggles and funny looks, but back in 1959, the American Embassy in Kathmandu was taking such expeditions seriously. In a memo issued on Nov. 30 of that year, the embassy listed three specific regulations for Yeti searches...

Researcher Claims to Have Shot and Killed a Sasquatch Nevada - (Ammoland.com) - Our regular readers will know that I love the story or idea that Bigfoots (or is it Bigfeets, as in more than one) could exist. So regular readers on AmmoLand never mind when we detour and take a break from all the serious news coverage to speculate on the idea that we have a giant man sized, wood booger, hunting the same woods as me and you. The recent gossip is, a controversial big foot researcher, named Rick Dyer, has shot a large bigfoot while filming a...

Russian Bigfoot DNA Analyzed By Scientists: Yeti Or Yogi? Bigfoot DNA is in the news again. Over the last three years, the Russian Bigfoot, or Yeti, was claimed to be a “towering, long-haired beast roaming the Mount Shoria region of southern Russia.” This potential Bigfoot has left clumps of hair in caves that scientists have just now analyzed. Professor Bryan Sykes of Oxford’s Wolfson Institute has led a global genetics project to test hair samples from possible Bigfoots. Professor Sykes told The Sun what he thought about this Bigfoot DNA: “The hairs did not come from a yeti. The American...

A new method of establishing hair and eye colour from modern forensic samples can also be used to identify details from ancient human remains, finds a new study published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Investigative Genetics. The HIrisPlex DNA analysis system was able to reconstruct hair and eye colour from teeth up to 800 years old, including the Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881 to 1943) confirming his blue eyes and blond hair.A team of researchers from Poland and the Netherlands, who recently developed the HIrisPlex system for forensic analysis, have now shown that this system is sufficiently robust to...

A newfound creature nicknamed "Dumbo" (pictured) may look like it's all ears--but the protrusions are actually fins that help propel the animal through the darkness 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) under the sea. Netted during a recent Census of Marine Life (CoML) expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, this Dumbo is among the thousands of deep-sea creatures the census has documented so far that live without ever knowing sunlight. Reaching six feet (two meters) in length and weighing 13 pounds (6 kilograms), the jumbo Dumbo is the largest of the octopus-like animals ever found.

Caught on camera: The world's deepest-dwelling fish five miles under the ocean's surface British scientists have filmed a species of fish said to be the deepest-dwelling ocean animal ever captured on camera. ...the ghostly white Hadal snail fish off Japan’s east coast at a depth of 7,700m.... Incredible: The snail fish survive in total darkness at a depth where the pressure is equivalent to 1,600 elephants standing on the roof of a Mini ...The hadal snailfish...are found below 3.7 miles...in total darkness, near-freezing temperatures and immense water pressure. They feed on the thousands of tiny shrimp-like creatures that scavenge the...

A 10-ton fishing boat has been sunk by gigantic jellyfish off eastern Japan. -snip- The crew of the fishing boat was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler, according to the Mainichi newspaper. The local Coast Guard office reported that the weather was clear and the sea was calm at the time of the accident.

We continue to hold BP responsible as the responsible party. But we are on them, watching them! This is how Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano described the federal involvement in cleaning the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico today. No kidding! The Obama administration is doing exactly this: watching BP from the sidelines. In fact we are all watching. There is a camera next to the crack in the pipe and we all are watching live deadly oil gushing into the ocean. As a teen I used to look for the Loch Ness monster on the live...

Deep-sea monster caught on tape WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — A ghostly, 23-foot-long creature glides through the deep sea, its gossamer fins billowing against the black water. Its arms, more than half its total length, trail behind like delicate threads. The squid doesn’t react right away to the submarine’s approach, but it shoots away into the dark once the sub gets too close. Researchers have captured scenes like this on videotape eight times, in four different oceans, within recent years. That’s quite a lot of exposure for an animal that no one has reported seeing before. USING THIS FOOTAGE, an international...

Thousands of jumbo flying squid - aggressive 5-foot-long sea monsters with razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacles - have invaded the shallow waters off San Diego, spooking scuba divers and washing up dead on tourist-packed beaches.

WELLINGTON (AFP) - The largest squid ever caught began to reveal its secrets Wednesday, including beach ball-sized eyes that scientists said were the biggest known in the animal kingdom. The 495-kilogram (1,090-pound) colossal squid -- accidentally caught by a fishing boat in Antarctic waters in February 2007 -- is slowly thawing under the fascinated gaze of a team of scientists at the Museum of New Zealand. While defrosting took longer than expected Wednesday, one of the earliest revelations were eyes measuring 27 centimetres (11 inches) across with lenses of 10 to 12 centimetres in diameter. In comparison, a human eye...

Boulder, CO, USA - Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so it seemed before Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin took a look at some of their remains in Nevada. Now he thinks there was an even larger and more cunning sea monster that preyed on ichthyosaurs: a kraken of such mythological proportions it would have sent Captain Nemo running for dry land. McMenamin will be presenting the results of his...

A restaurant has created a dish, named Odori don - literally meaning dancing squid rice bowl - by adding soy sauce to a fresh squid. Video here. (Scroll down the page to see the video).

Australian scientists have discovered never-seen-before prehistoric marine life in the depths of the ocean below the Great Barrier Reef, the University of Queensland said Wednesday. Ancient “six-gilled” sharks, giant oil fish, swarms of crustaceans and many unidentified fish – all of which look worthy of a science-fiction film – were among the astounding marine life caught on camera some 1,400 meters (4,593 feet) below sea level. The team, led by Justin Marshall, also collected footage of the Nautilius, a relative of the octopus that still lives in a shell as they have done for millions of years. Team members used...

Jumbo Humboldt squid wash up minutes after 4.0 earthquake hit off the coast of La Jolla It was an odd start to the morning in La Jolla. First residents were jolted out of bed at 7.34 a.m. by a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that was centered 19 miles out to sea. First residents were jolted out of bed by an earthquake, which is not uncommon in San Diego, but what happened just minutes later was a little fishy. “I was having coffee up on the balcony and I felt it shaking,” Kate Lutkemeier said. She wasn’t the only one. “I heard...

"The animal, dubbed an "octosquid," is found off the Big Isle"

An adult specimen of the world’s largest known squid was hauled to the surface by a New Zealand longliner fishing for toothfish in Antarctic waters. The creature, known as a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) and with eyes the size of a car tire weighed an estimated 450 kilograms. The squid was eating a hooked toothfish when it was hauled from the deep by the vessel San Aspiring. "It is likely that it is the first intact adult male colossal squid to ever be successfully landed," Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said today. "The scientific community will be very interested in this...

Big blob baffles boffins July 2 2003 Chilean scientists were baffled today by a huge, gelatinous sea creature found washed up on the southern Pacific coast and were seeking international help identifying the mystery specimen. The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 40-foot-long (12-metre) mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh apparently was an invertebrate. "We'd never before seen such a strange specimen, We don't know if it might be a giant squid that is missing some of its parts or maybe it's...

SANTIAGO, Chile - Fishermen found the 39-foot-long carcass of a sea creature on a beach in the south of Chile, and conservation specialists were trying to determine if it was an octopus. The creature, believed to be of the species octopus giganteus, was found near Los Muermos, 683 miles south of Santiago. The remains weigh about 13 tons. Elsa Cabrera, of the Cetacean Conservation Center, said that similar animals have been found recently in New Zealand. Cabrera, who is a specialist in submarine photography, took samples of the creature to send to Italy, France and the United States to determine...

SAN DIEGO -- Hundreds of squid are washing up on La Jolla Coves beaches as a result of warm El Nino weather patterns, 10News reported. Video - Calamari Anyone? The squid may be getting stuck in a warm water current and pushed into San Diego waters 10News reported. The beachings are creating a big problem for swimmers and a big stink for residents. The area is popular with divers and snorkelers, but officials are concerned that the squids' ink may be unhealthy. The jumbo flying squid, known by their scientific name Dosidicus gigas, normally nestle in the eastern Pacific Ocean....

Science in Search of the Low Rumble Infrasound can be used to communicate over thousands of km The study of low frequency sound is giving science new perspectives on the natural world as well as helping to develop novel weapons technologies. Julian Trick reports. Sound waves so low in frequency that the human ear cannot detect them may be behind ghostly sightings and haunted buildings. Human ears detect sounds in the frequency range of about 20 to 20,000 Hertz, or cycles per second. Anything below 20 Hz is defined as infrasound, which although not heard, is experienced in the form...

Sounds from the deep baffle scientists Mysterious giant beasts may lurk in the darkest depths of the ocean, making whale-like noises that are baffling scientists. Researchers have nicknamed the strange unidentified sound picked up by undersea microphones "Bloop". While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth. In 1997, Bloop was detected by sensors up to 3,000 miles apart, New Scientist magazine reports. One suggestion is that the sound is coming from giant squid, which live at extreme depths of up to two and...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - Marine scientists in New Zealand on Tuesday were thawing the corpse of the largest squid ever caught to try to unlock the secrets of one of the ocean's most mysterious beasts. No one has ever seen a living, grown colossal squid in its natural deep ocean habitat, and scientists hope their examination of the 1,089-pound, 26-foot long colossal squid, set to begin Wednesday, will help determine how the creatures live. The thawing and examination are being broadcast live on the Internet. The squid, which was caught accidentally by fishermen last year, was removed from its freezer...

MONTEREY, Calif. - Jumbo squid that can grow up to 7 feet long and weigh more than 110 pounds is invading central California waters and preying on local anchovy, hake and other commercial fish populations, according to a study published Tuesday. An aggressive predator, the Humboldt squid — or Dosidicus gigas — can change its eating habits to consume the food supply favored by tuna and sharks, its closest competitors, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. "Having a new, voracious predator set up shop here in California may be yet another...

Updated:2007-02-22 13:47:58 Rare Squid Could Be Largest Ever Hooked Massive Catch Has Rings the Size of Truck Tires By RAY LILLEY AP WELLINGTON, New Zealand (Feb. 22) - A fishing crew has caught a colossal squid that could weigh a half-ton and prove to be the biggest specimen ever landed, a fisheries official said Thursday. The squid, weighing an estimated 990 pounds and about 39 feet long, took two hours to land in Antarctic waters, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said. The fishermen were catching Patagonian toothfish, sold under the name Chilean sea bass, south of New Zealand "and...

Huge eyeball turns up in Pompano Beach Taking his usual morning stroll along the surf in Pompano Beach, Gino Covacci noticed a strange ball-like object at the high tide line. He kicked it over and found himself staring at the biggest eyeball he had ever seen. The blue, softball-sized orb he found Wednesday was a departure from the shells, cigarette butts and seaweed he usually sees. He put it in a plastic bag and put that in the refrigerator. "It was very, very fresh," he said Thursday. "It was still bleeding when I put it in the plastic bag." He...

<p>So much for the theory that President Bush's "obsession" with Saddam Hussein has detracted from the war on terrorism. The apprehension in Pakistan of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed certainly cut off that tired argument at the knees.</p> <p>As chief of operations, Mr. Mohammed was one of the biggest squids in the al-Qaida network. He is believed to have masterminded for Osama bin Laden the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. He's also thought to have orchestrated 1998's simultaneous bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.</p>

Dozens of large squid are reportedly washing up dead on the central Oregon coast near Heceta Head. Oregon State Parks and Recreation spokesman Chris Havel tells the Oregonian his office is hearing reports of dozens of what are probably Humboldt squid. He says they're typically much more common in warmer waters around Santa Cruz, Calif. Humboldt squid have also showed up recently in waters off the Washington coast and in the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Washington state and British Columbia's Vancouver Island. Commercial fishermen in the strait complained the giant squid were grabbing the salmon right off their...

The mating habits of deep-sea squid have been revealed for the first time, after the discovery of a male squid with a huge elongated and erect penis. The male squid's sexual organ is almost as long as its whole body, including the squid's mantle, head and arms. That shows how male deep-sea squid inseminate females; they use their huge penis to shoot out packages of sperm, injecting them into the female's body. The discovery may also help explain how giant squid mate in the ocean depths.....

In what could be the ultimate marine smack-down, great white sharks off the California coast may be migrating 1,600 miles west to do battle with creatures that rival their star power: giant squids. A series of studies tracking this mysterious migration has scientists rethinking not just what the big shark does with its time but also what sort of creature it is. Few sea denizens match great white sharks and giant squids in primitive mystique. Both are the subject of popular mania; both are inscrutable. That these two mythic sea monsters might convene for epic battles in the stark expanses...

They're not quite sea monsters, but anglers here are landing squid nearly 6 feet long, far larger than a typical catch. One Newport Landing Sportfishing boat came back Saturday with a load of squid that averaged 30 pounds each, and 5 feet in length. A 4-pound squid is typical, but the largest in the catch weighed 50 pounds and was nearly 6 feet long. "People were getting wet and trying to avoid getting inked," said Newport Landing manager Steffanie Hillerstein. The boat was fishing the waters just south of Laguna Beach. Anglers, using 10-inch long lures, needed nearly 10 minutes...

A colossal squid has been caught in Antarctic waters, the first example of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni retrieved virtually intact from the surface of the ocean. "All we knew prior to this specimen coming through was that this animal lived in the abyssal environment down in Antarctica," New Zealand squid expert and senior research fellow at Auckland University of Technology, Dr Steve O'Shea, told BBC News Online. "Now we know that it is moving right through the water column, right up to the very surface and it grows to a spectacular size." Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni was first identified in 1925 after two arms...

Scientists said on Wednesday a huge mass of slimy flesh that washed up on a Chilean beach last week may be a rare type of giant octopus or just discarded whale blubber. In an unrelated story, Helen Thomas, Maddy Albright, and Janet Reno were seen on a Chilean beach during their vacation late last week.