Amateur versus professional: the search for Bigfoot.
Those who would seek monsters not as metaphors, but as flesh and blood organisms have gone largely overlooked by the history of science. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s a group of amateur monster hunters and physical anthropologists began to pursue such creatures as Sasquatch, Bigfoot and the Yeti as living species. Whether or not such creatures exist, the monster hunters themselves are fascinating subjects for study, illustrating the tensions that are all too common between amateur naturalists and professional scientists.
History Department, Kean University, 1000 Morris Avenue, Union, NJ 07083, USA. bregal@kean.edu
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D000818:Animals; D000883:Anthropology / Q000266:history*; D005101:Expeditions; D049673:History, 20th Century; D015186:Hominidae; D006801:Humans; D014481:United States; D015046:Zoology / Q000266:history*