– – I’m thankful for hairy hominids, without which this blog might soon expire from starvation. And so, good readers, if you can suffer one more yeti theory, we offer yet another explanation being advanced: the yeti is a type of previously-unknown, hybrid bear.
British researcher Bryan Sykes, a human geneticist at Oxford, has analyzed hairs from two alleged yetis, sequenced their DNA, and found a 100% match with a DNA sample from the jaw of an ancient polar bear. Now Sykes is not saying that there are ancient polar bears wandering around in the Himalayas, but only that there could be a subspecies of brown bear in the High Himalayas descended from the bear that was the ancestor to the polar bear. The Yeti accordingly may be a hybrid descended from two species of bear, an extinct polar bear and a closely related brown bear.
Such a species of bear might behave differently from other known bears, possibly being more dangerous, aggressive, or bipedal…and this Abominable Snowman apparently has a unique ability to cause any video recording device to go out of focus…
– – Harvard geneticist George M. Church created waves recently when poorly-translated comments he made to a German-language magazine led to reports that he was looking for “an extremely adventurous female human” to serve as a surrogate mother for a cloned Neanderthal using developing technology. With fragments of Neanderthal DNA in fossils, Church noted that someday it might be possible to assemble them into a complete genome that could be put into a human egg to create a cloned embryo, which in turn could be put into a human surrogate mother to bring back a human relative long extinct.
– – Too often, fish are regarded as dumber than a sack of hammers. This may not be true of all of our finned friends, however. In France, researchers at the University of Toulouse have observed catfish hunting pigeons as prey in a development scientists are calling evidence of adaptive behavior. 
– – A prominent veterinarian is contending that Bigfoot exists, and is part human! A five-year DNA study by DNA Diagnostics, a team of scientists in Texas chaired by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum, sequenced purported samples of Bigfoot DNA, finding that mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited, is identical to human mitochondrial DNA. Nuclear DNA samples, containing genetic material from both parents, appeared to involve a “novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species.”
– – We all know that parrots and mynah birds can mimic human speech. A memorable Far Side cartoon depicted a carload of cows driving past a field of wandering humans, one cow leaning out the window and mocking the “yackety-yack” speech of people. Well, it seems that we can add another species to the short list of those now know to be capable of speech mimicry..the beluga whale!
– – A not-so giant mammoth excavated from the Siberian permafrost in late September 2,200 miles northeast of Moscow near the Sopochnaya Karga cape was a 16-year-old at the time of his death who stood two meters tall (6’6″) and weighed 500 kilograms (1,100 lbs). He was named Jenya after the 11-year-old Russian boy who found the animal’s limbs sticking out of the frozen mud. Jenya was missing a left tusk, a fact which handicapped him for fighting and may have contributed to his early death tens of thousands of years ago.
– – I’m sure that you’ll all be pleased as punch to learn that scientists in the U.S. have created a free-swimming artificial jellyfish! I, for one, know that when at the ocean, I can never have enough of them bumping against me in the tide or lying on the beach.
– – Roughly 298 million years ago, a volcano erupted in the Inner Mongolian district near the modern-day city of Wuda, China raining down volcanic ash with such intensity that a forest was quickly buried and essentially preserved in remarkable detail down to branch and leaf structure. American and Chinese scientists have recently excavated this lost forest, ironically through coal mining activities in the region. 
FOXSYLVANIA 
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