A recent posting by Jay Cooney at Bizzare Zoology compared the screen capture of an Algonquin Park drive-by video purporting to show a kind of ape. Jay said it was a Bigfoot and that he thought the head matched the skull of a Paranthropus (Robust Australopithecine) I disagrred and said it was something more apelike (If it is indeed a live creature and not a mock-up of some sort)
Here is the panoramic view of the shot where the apelike figure appears, and below a cropping of it
My comment was that the image was much too blurry to be certain of anything, and we needed a face-on view to be comparable whereas we would need a profile shot of establish if it was a Paranthropus or not. A Paranthropus has a more vertical profile where a common ape has a protruding muzzle and prominent canines. And as a counter-proposal, I did the comparison with an ordinary ape, an orangutan, the lower one with a direct superimposition of the skull on the photo (The skull is still not quite at the proper size and it is a mite too large for the direct comparson)
Here is a reconstruction of a Miocene Sivapithecine together with a reconstruction
of the fossil skull (which was partial) Below is the Canadian "ape face" again
Although it is difficult to make out I think I the lower face definitely has
a more elongated muzzle than a Paranthropus would have.
Jay also suggested that it was the samne as the Western Sasquatch
such as is shown in the Patterson-Gimlin film
A direct comparison shows that this Wood Ape from Canada has a smaller head
more pinched-in shoulders and much longer arms than 'Patty' has;
While by the same token, Patty is bigger and more heavily built than the Paranthropus, but once again a smaller head and longer arms, and is intermediate to the regular ape proportions in that.
In comparison to the Paranthropus , the Algonquin Park Wood Ape shows these
same features in an even more exaggerated sense. Head much smaller and arms longer still.
And so I did a series of comparisons to more mundane apes.
First a chimpanzee:
Then a comparison to a gorilla:
(The head seems closest here)
And then to the orangutan.
All in all I think the orangutan wins out because the overall
appearance is most similar, and especially the limb proportions are most similar.
Here is the source, from the Time-Life Nature Library book Evolution (the appendix)
And a comparison of the apes in general. I noted when I included this Harry Wilson Deviant Art illustration earlier that the Ufiti is in the Bili Ape size range and that the West African Bonobo is still an "Unknown animal"-classification of apes into species is still uncertain and cointroversial.
Here is the source video from YouTube. I believe Jay got his information about this from Bigfoot Evidence.
