Jeffrey Meldrum, Scholar Who Stalked Bigfoot, Dies at 67

Jeffrey Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University whose expertise in foot morphology and bipedal locomotion in primates took a maverick swerve as he became the leading academic authority to vouch for the existence of Bigfoot, died on Sept. 9 in Pocatello, Idaho. He was 67.

His wife, Lauren Stewart, said on social media that the cause was brain cancer.

Dr. Meldrum’s willingness to bring scientific rigor to the study of Bigfoot, the hairy giant who has also been known as Sasquatch and who has resided mainly in folklore and the popular culture of the Pacific Northwest, earned him the gratitude of enthusiasts, who claimed to have sighted the creature, as well as the withering scorn of debunkers.

His interest dated from boyhood, but his serious investigations began in 1996, when he examined a set of 15-inch footprints outside Walla Walla, Wash. His lab came to house more than 300 footprint casts, as well as samples of hair and feces.

“I’m not out to proselytize that Bigfoot exists,” Dr. Meldrum told The Associated Press in 2006. “I place legend under scrutiny, and my conclusion is, absolutely, Bigfoot exists.”

Supposed sightings of a Bigfoot-like hominid took off in the 1970s. Even the F.B.I. once investigated.

But almost all Dr. Meldrum’s fellow scientists, including on his own campus, called his research pseudoscience. They said he was fanning the same distrust of learned expertise that has given rise to denials of climate change or the belief in U.F.O. abductions.

Some 30 professors at Idaho State wrote to university officials in 2006 protesting the Bigfoot Rendezvous — part festival with cosplay and part academic symposium — that was held on campus and at which Dr. Meldrum was a featured speaker.

“He believes he’s taken up the cause of people who have been shut out by the scientific community,” Mr. Hackworth said. “He’s lionized there. He’s worshiped. He walks on water. It’s embarrassing.”

Dr. Meldrum was defended by the university’s dean of arts and sciences, John Kijinski. “He provides a form of open discussion and dissenting viewpoints that may not be popular with the scientific community,” Dr. Kijinksi said, “but that’s what academics is all about.”

According to an article at the time in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dr. Meldrum was twice passed over for promotion to full professor by his department, biological sciences, because of his Sasquatch studies.

“Why can’t we take a serious look at this as objective scientists?” he pleaded to The Chronicle. “It’s almost as if the spirit of exploration has kind of died.” (He eventually achieved full professorship, in 2012.)

Acknowledging that some Sasquatch “evidence” was the work of hoaxers, Dr. Meldrum argued in a 2006 book, “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science,” that much of it was too sophisticated to be produced by pranksters.

Castings of footprints in his collection, he wrote, showed anatomical features typical of chimpanzees, including a midtarsal break — two joints in the midfoot, a formation found in apes but not in humans. Hoaxers using wooden blocks to leave prints would have been unlikely to understand those fine anatomical distinctions, Dr. Meldrum argued.

And he maintained that the purported Bigfoot in a famous film snippet made in Northern California in 1967, which skeptics have said is a person in a costume, walked in too apelike a manner to be fake.

David J. Daegling, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, dismissed Dr. Meldrum’s conclusions in the magazine of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which investigates controversial claims.

“If ‘Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science” is in fact the best, most credible and most scientific book to date on Bigfoot, the evidence is weaker than we imagined,” Dr. Daegling wrote.

In a book of his own, “Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend” (2004), Dr. Daegling wrote that hairy ape-men who live in the forest are found in myths from around the world and reflect a psychological projection of humankind’s estrangement from wild nature.

Don Jeffrey Meldrum was born on May 24, 1958, in Salt Lake City, the eldest of three children of Don and Marilyn (Collings) Meldrum. His father worked for the supermarket chain Albertson’s, and the family moved around the Northwest.

As a boy, Jeffrey was excited by the Bigfoot legend, telling his friends that someday he would find one in the wild. “Good luck hunting for Bigfoot,” a friend wrote in his yearbook when he graduated in 1976 from Capital High School in Boise, Idaho.

He interrupted his studies at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, to serve a two-year mission in Germany for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Returning to Brigham Young, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1982 and a master’s in 1984, both in zoology.

He earned his Ph.D. in anatomical sciences from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1989. Dr. Meldrum taught at Duke and Northwestern before joining Idaho State’s faculty in 1993.

His marriage to Teresa Little ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Stewart, whom he married in 2009, he is survived by his parents; his brother, Mike; his sister, Molly Meldrum; his sons from his first marriage, Colin, Sean, Devin, Trevor, Kayd and Brendon; a stepdaughter, Sarah Stewart; two stepsons, Scott and Kyle Vawter; and six grandchildren.

Dr. Meldrum was the co-editor of “From Biped to Strider: The Emergence of Modern Human Walking, Running, and Resource Transport” (2004), a respected mainstream text. But he devoted much of his professional life to pursuing Bigfoot.

Under “Field Experience,” his C.V. listed Sasquatch expeditions in the Blue Mountains of eastern Washington, the Canadian Rockies and Wyoming’s Wind River Range. He claimed that on these trips he heard teeth clacking unexplainably, and that something too big to be a bear once brushed against his tent.

His interests in wildmen ranged to encompass others that are part of folk beliefs around the world. He published treatises on the Himalayan Yeti, the Yeren of China and the Nguoi Rung of Vietnam.

One respected scientist who did not reject Dr. Meldrum out of hand was Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist who died this month. In a blurb for “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science,” Dr. Goodall wrote that it brought “a much needed level of scientific analysis” to its subject.