In the field of Bigfoot research — and cryptozoology as a whole — few matched the academic grounding and scientific acumen of Dr. Don Jeffrey Meldrum. A full professor of anatomy and anthropology in the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University, Meldrum was regarded as an authority on primate locomotion and foot morphology.
Meldrum’s fascination with the subject began at age 11, when he saw the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. But it wasn’t until he joined Idaho State University, near the heart of Bigfoot country in the Pacific Northwest, that he pursued the topic in earnest. Discovering a set of large, unexplained footprints in southeastern Washington in 1996 cemented his interest.
A frequent guest on television programs such as Finding Bigfoot, MonsterQuest and Is It Real, Meldrum may be best known for his book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. Though met with skepticism in some scientific circles, the book brought uncommon rigour and anthropological insight to a field often dismissed as fringe.
“He does bring more scientific rigour to this question than anyone else in the past, and he does do state-of-the-art footprint analysis,” Dr. David R. Begun, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto, told Scientific American in 2007.
For many followers of the Bigfoot phenomenon — especially those who balanced curiosity with skepticism — Meldrum offered hope. If a large, elusive primate, known mainly from footprints and grainy footage, roamed the Pacific Northwest, who better to find the truth than a scholar of primate locomotion?
Meldrum died September 10 at 67 after a short battle with brain cancer.
Photo courtesy Rachel Anne Seymour