Picture this: a young scientist is meticulously poring over piles of plaster in his lab, stroking his beard and sifting through fragmentary evidence trying to determine the validity of a giant creature that may not even exist. Is this early 2000s Jeff Meldrum, or perhaps another Sasquatch researcher digging through…
The lack of a fossil record for apes in North America is a common hill for many skeptics to plant their flag on, but it is a hill made artificially tall by hindsight biases perpetuated in entertainment and media. Such a position presumes that all species must leave evidence of…
Ethology is an underappreciated field of biology that is often overshadowed by the more common 'E' keywords like Evolution, Environment, Ecology, Extinction, so on and so forth. I certainly didn't hear the term until well after college, let alone in a grade school science classroom. As an independent field of…
We at the Olympic Project would like to pay homage to our own patron saint "Patty" with a pointer to this 2013 paper in RHI by Bill Munns and Jeff Meldrum analyzing the presence of skin folds and body fat on the Patterson-Gimlin Film subject. Here's hoping you all "get…
Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning has become all the rage over the last decade, especially with the publication of AlexNet in 2012 combined with the rising power of parallel computing via graphics cards (GPUs). AlexNet was the seminal work spurring the rise of deep CNNs (Convolutional Neural Nets, not Anderson…
Size is a trait so strongly associated with Bigfoot it has become embedded in its mythology. After all, "Big" is half of the name. But just how Big are we talking about here? Short of weighing one in a zoo, there are a few mathematical ways we could guess the…
This was a fantastic interview from 2019 with Kelly @ Frightday, where the good Doctor lectures for a full 2 hour class length on everything from the PGF to population size estimates. We need more interviews and scientific discussions like this, from more people! https://www.frightday.com/a-conversation-with-jeff-meldrum/
As we've previously stated on this blog, if you want to do science, you need to get familiar with how scientists talk (and write) so that you will be better equipped to 1) discern what is research, and what is BS and 2) effectively communicate your ideas in findings in…
Les plants himself in Bigfoot hot spots across North America, collecting stories and experiences from Bigfoot believers, gathering and examining evidence to debunk the mysteries that surround this ancient legend. Les has had his own eerie experiences in the wild, things he can’t quite explain, but he isn’t a Bigfoot…
With the fresh resurrection of this blog, we at the Olympic Project would like to ring in the New Year with some something very old, but very important: a series of essays reiterating the fundamental building blocks of biology, zoology, and the scientific and academic process in general, all reduced…
