But he couldn't. "When I got on my knees and looked closely," he recalls, "I could see dermal ridge details"—the dips and whorls of fingerprints—"that would be awfully hard to fake."
In his lab in the Life Sciences building at Idaho State, where I go to meet him, Meldrum throws open drawers full of bones and footprints to find a cast of that Blue Mountain track. "Here it is," he says, holding up a white Shaquille-size plaster cast. "The subtle detail is incredible. Both humans and apes have only two phalanges, or segments, in their big toes and thumbs, and three in the rest. See this small toe? There's one, two, three phalanges. But look at the length of that. The foot is only about 15 inches, yet the small toe is as long as my pinkie finger. What that tells you is that this foot would have a grasping ability as good as my hand."
Fully hooked, Meldrum examined print casts that dated back to the late 1950s. Some he tossed as obvious hoaxes. Others contained impossible-to-fake signs of veracity. "When they discover tracks, most people cast only the clearest footprint," he says. "I looked for the messier prints, because they're the ones that tell me something about how the animal moved."
Then an even stranger thing happened. He started to recognize identical prints found years apart. "Here's the Bigfoot that Jerry Crew cast in 1958," he says, holding up a plaster cast familiar from the Humboldt Times photo. "Now here's a track found near Hyampom, California, about 60 miles south, in 1961. When you look at the shape, proportions, and relative positions of the toes, they're from the same guy. I say guy because it looks like a big male."
For Meldrum—who is a curator in the BFRO—the discovery of the Skookum Cast was also momentous. "The ridge detail I saw in the skin eliminates bear, elk, and coyote," he told me. "That sort of detail is characteristic only of primates."
