Bigfoot? At Berkeley?

Hold your fire, if not your skepticism. In the equivocal spirit of sightings of Bigfoot himself — according to folklore and a handful of so-called cryptozoologists, a towering, humanlike hominid that roams the dense forests of the American Northwest and British Columbia on two legs — casts of what may or may not be the creature’s footprints are now on view at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

Whatever they are or aren’t, though, they are most definitely a conversation piece. The plaster casts were created by the late anthropologist Grover Krantz, a one-time Berkeley grad student and Hearst Museum preparator who went on to become one of the world’s best-known researchers of Bigfoot, also called Sasquatch. (He hypothesized that the species was part of a surviving population of Gigantopithecines, an extinct ape.) The prints, allegedly, are from tracks made by an individual called Cripplefoot and found in the snow by a local butcher near a Bossburg, Wash., garbage dump in 1969. Krantz donated the casts to the museum in 1970. read more