geograph.org.uk The quest for definitive proof of bigfoot, the towering man-like ape that reportedly walks on two legs and terrorizes loggers and campers in North America, has been well documented for decades. The search for his Russian counterpart is less well known. 
 
 A group of Russian enthusiasts says they have new evidence of the existence of a Russian bigfoot — and it was found just outside of Moscow. 
 
 On a table inside the capital's illustrious State Darwin Museum last month, surrounded by glass cases containing beetles and moths, lies the purported proof: a fragment of tree bark that appears to have been marked by a large primate. 
 
 The bark sample was taken by Andrei Stroganov, a biophysical technologist at Moscow's Agricultural Academy, from an uprooted two-meter-long tree trunk that he says had been planted in the earth and marked with horizontal scratches. Stroganov found the curiosity in July in a forested area near a railway line in the Solnechnogorsk district — just five kilometers from the Moscow satellite town of Zelenograd — while scouring the forests for signs of the Almas, as the Russian bigfoot is known, after hearing reports that such a creature had been spotted in the area. 
 
 "The Almas is cosmopolitan," jokes Stroganov in response to an expression of alarm at its apparent proximity to the capital. 
 
 "I am not worried: They are benevolent and need our protection." 
 
 Igor Burtsev, an athletic septuagenarian who has become Russia's most vocal publicist for Almas research and is also present in the Darwin Museum, concurs. He calls the as yet mythical creatures "Forest People" and sees them as a hybrid species, half-human and half-something unknown. 
 
 Stroganov has placed the tree bark behind Perspex glass, over which he has drawn measurements. He thinks the marks resemble a paw print measuring nine inches across. There are no thumb marks, nor are there the claw marks of a bear. 
 
 Stroganov takes swabs of the bark prints and, with Burtsev videoing the proceedings, secures them in small plastic folders. They will air-mail these to Alabama in the U.S., where the Russian-born researcher Vladimir Yamschekov will do a morphological study of the traces and check out any DNA. 
 
 Burtsev heads a closed online Russian-speaking community of researchers and investigators that includes members in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. They all share the belief that the Almas announces its presence with stick structures. 
 
 Burtsev has just returned from a 1,730-kilometer journey to the city of Miass in the Urals region of Chelyabinsk, where he stayed with someone who claimed to have seen a Almas and be able to show just such signs of the creature's habitats. 
 
 He was reluctant to discuss the details, saying only that he had seen "confirmation" of the Almas' presence there. 
 
 "There is more information on this than when I started 50 years ago," he said. "Then again, people have less time now and travel is more expensive. The bigfoot scene in America is bigger." 
 
 Indeed, the quest for definitive proof of bigfoot, the towering man-like ape that reportedly walks on two legs and terrorizes loggers and campers in North America, has been well documented for decades. The search for his Russian counterpart is less well known. 
 
 The Soviet government set up a "Almas Commission" in 1958 to conduct field work on the matter after Everest mountaineers returned with tales of the yeti. The commission was short-lived, but areas like the Urals, Siberia's Kemerovo region and the Caucasus became known as the stomping ground of the real-life Almas. 
 
 Burtsev, who lives with his daughter in a Moscow suburb, is waiting on a visa to visit America. There he will reconnect with bigfoot advocates such as Thom Cantrall and Randy Bisson, and hopes to generate interest in an English-language book he has written on the Kemerovo Almas. 
 
 Science joins the quest 
 
 Russia's yeti-hunters have not only allies abroad, but also those who argue against the Almas' existence. 
 
 Professor Bryan Sykes, a 67-year-old geneticist and fellow of Wolford College, Oxford, has written his own book debunking some purported evidence of the creature's existence. Sykes previously helped identify the bones of the last of the Romanovs, Russia's royal family murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Now, in "The Yeti Enigma," due out in September, he draws on the same expertise to look at alleged yeti evidence. He claims that all the 39 supposed yeti hairs and teeth samples that he tested came from ordinary animals. Sykes has also suggested that the Himalayan yeti is a species of polar bear. 
 
 Last October, Burtsev took on his nemesis in a TV series called "The Bigfoot Files" broadcast by the U.K.'s Channel 4. 
 
 The two men also clashed over a skull in Burtsev's possession believed to have belonged to the son of a "wild woman" who had been held in captivity in Mongolia 150 years ago. After testing some samples, Sykes hypothesised that she might have been a black African slave, or a descendant of a group of people who migrated to Mongolia from Africa thousands of years ago. Burtsev insists that the skull's shape is not that of an ordinary human. 
 
 Michael Trachtengerts, a colleague of Burtsev who also featured in the program, remains unswayed by Sykes' arguments against the existence of the yeti. 
 
 "The samples he tested were doubtful," he says over a recent lunch in a Moscow cafe. "Hairs from Siberia were identified as belonging to a North American brown bear! How is that possible?" 
 
 Trachtengerts, who has his own dual-language website on the Almas, remains optimistic that proof will soon be found. He is nearly 80. 
 
 Mission to America 
 
 
 
 While Burtsev waits for his U.S. visa, his collection of footprint casts — as well as the contentious skull — remain stashed away in a Moscow garage. Burtsev hopes to transfer them to a sanctuary in the form of the State Darwin Museum. 
 
 The museum has provided a haven for the Almas hunters since 1960. They gather there every month. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the museum officially believes in their cause. 
 
 "I specialize in birds, and haven't looked into this problem," says Vitaly Kontorshchikov, a staff member of the museum's ecology department who was present at the bark examination. 
 
 "However, we can say nothing until we have some real bone samples. No bones — no science," he said. 
 
 This leaves the usually garrulous Bourtsev silent. He merely offers a sphinx-like smile. ||||| A team of scientists led by Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes has published the first-ever systematic DNA analysis of alleged Bigfoot or Yeti hair samples in a peer-reviewed journal. 
 
 this is the first systematic, peer-reviewed dna analysis of bigfoot hair samples 
 
 Their study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, finds that these samples, alas, didn't come from any mythical creature — and when people thought they saw a Bigfoot, they actually spotted a bear, wolf, or even a cow. 
 
 Interestingly, two hair samples from the Himalayas are most closely related to an ancient species of polar bear, suggesting a previously-unknown polar bear descendant or brown bear-polar bear hybrid might remain in the region. 
 
 Of course, all this doesn't disprove the existence of an unknown species like Bigfoot. But it does eliminate the 30 hair samples that were sequenced — collected in Russia, the Himalayas, and the US — as possible evidence for the cryptid. 
 
 The scientists' DNA testing of "Bigfoot" hairs 
 
 This analysis was first reported by Sykes last year, and has now been peer-reviewed and published for the first time. For the study, he and colleagues performed DNA analyses on 37 hair samples submitted by people in the US (mostly from the Pacific northwest, along with a few from Texas, California, and Arizona), Russia, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sumatra. These samples were all collected in the vicinity of an alleged Bigfoot or Yeti sighting, with the collectors claiming them as proof of the mythical creatures. 
 
 Ultimately, the researchers were able to isolate DNA from 30 of these samples — generally from bits of skin or follicle attached to the hairs' roots. When they sequenced and analyzed these DNA samples, they found that all 30 were complete matches with known species' DNA. 
 
 when scientists sequenced the hairs' dna, all 30 were complete matches with known species' 
 
 The 18 US samples came mostly from black bears, wolves, and coyotes, but some were found to match with raccoon, sheep, porcupine, horse, cow, deer, and even human DNA sequences. It's possible that, in some cases, a person spotted what they thought was a Bigfoot, then erroneously collected hair from another animal (perhaps themselves). 
 
 The eight Russian hair samples — purported to come from Almasty, a hominid believed to live in the Caucasus Mountains — also came from bears, horses, cows, and raccoons, while alleged Yeti hairs, collected in Nepal, came from a goat-like animal called a serow. 
 
 The most interesting findings applied to two samples collected in Ladakh, India, and Bhutan, both in the Himalayas. Their genetic sequences were similar (but not identical) to those of modern polar bears — and unexpectedly matched DNA that was extracted in 2010 from a 40,000 year old polar bear fossil. 
 
 The hairs, though, were brown, not white. The researchers aren't quite sure what to make of this finding, but suggest that it may be evidence of a previously unknown type of brown bear that descended from polar bears, or perhaps even a brown bear-polar bear hybrid. Similar grizzly-polar bear hybrids have been found in Canada, but polar bears aren't known to live in the Himalayas, and we've never before seen a brown-polar bear hybrid. 
 
 So why are scientists bothering to do this? 
 
 Historically, most scientists have ignored claims of Bigfoot and other cryptids. This has led Bigfoot believers — who usually claim eyewitness sightings, tracks, and other sorts of indirect evidence as proof of the creature — to argue that they've been rejected by mainstream science, creating an air of mistrust and distance between the two groups. 
 
 sykes wants to bring bigfoot investigations into realm of the scientific process 
 
 But recent advances in DNA analysis now allow scientists to analyze one form of indirect evidence in particular: hair. Sykes has decided to use this to bring Bigfoot investigations into the realm of the scientific process — in which ideas are rigorously tested and, if found to be refuted by data, discarded. 
 
 This new analysis doesn't refute the concept of Bigfoot as a whole — but it does rule out these hair samples as evidence of the creature. 
 
 Little other credible Bigfoot scientific research has been done so far. The Sasquatch Genome Project is supposedly attempting to use DNA analysis towards this goal as well, but its findings have been largely disregarded as erroneous (at best) or fraudulent (at worst). 
 
 For years, scientists have affirmed that the best evidence — the type usually used to establish the existence of new living species — would be an actual Bigfoot body, whether dead or alive. Obviously, we're still waiting for that body to be found. 
 
 Further reading: My feature on the search for the Skunk Ape, Bigfoot's mythical swamp-dwelling cousin in Florida.
– People in the US have long been on the hunt for Bigfoot, just like those in Canada are in search of Sasquatch and the Himalayas lay claim to the Yeti. But did you know Russians have their own version of an extra large and hairy primate, the Almas? And now a researcher in Russia says he's found evidence in the form of a piece of bark that Almas not only exists but is wandering the forests on the outskirts of Moscow. "The Almas is cosmopolitan," Andrei Stroganov tells the Moscow Times. "I am not worried: They are benevolent and need our protection." The biophysical technologist at Moscow's prestigious Agricultural Academy says he found a piece of tree bark near Moscow that appears to have been marked by a large primate. He believes the horizontal scratches on the bark are from a paw print nine inches across, and there are no claw marks to indicate they came from a bear. Long in search of Almas proof, he also claims to have confirmed the presence of Almas during a recent visit to Chelyabinsk in the Urals, but declined to go into details. The next step is to send swabs of the bark prints to Alabama, where a Russian-born researcher will analyze any DNA found and do a morphological investigation. But one of Stroganov's Almas-hunting colleagues has previously been challenged by an Oxford geneticist who said last year that after putting out calls for Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch hairs in 2012, he performed DNA tests on the samples sent to him and they pointed to a bear—either a newly discovered species or some hybrid between brown and polar bears, reports National Geographic. Back in 1958, the Soviet government established a short-lived "Almas Commission" to look for the creature; nowadays, Almas is typically thought to roam the Kemerovo region of Siberia, the Caucasus, and the Urals. (Earlier this year, a Texas man claimed to have killed Bigfoot, but...)