GROVER KRANTZ, who has died aged 70, spent 30 years hunting the Sasquatch, or "Bigfoot", the apelike creature which is supposed to haunt the forests of the Pacific north west of America.
Krantz was a professor of physical anthropology at Washington State University. He was sceptical about Bigfoot until, in 1970, he examined some footprints which he decided were genuine.
Later, looking at footprints in the Blue Mountains near Walla Walla, he found dermal ridges - lines on the skin that also create fingerprints - on footprint casts.
Subsequently, Krantz interviewed hundreds of people who said they had seen Bigfoot, and conducted a frame-by-frame analysis of the only known film footage of the animal, made in North Carolina in 1967.
Most experts had dismissed the film as a hoax and the creature in the film as a man wearing a monkey suit, but Krantz believed it was genuine. And though he never encountered Bigfoot, and despite the fact that no remains of such an animal had ever been found in North America, Krantz felt he had enough evidence to describe its natural history.
In Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch, he suggested that around 2,000 of the animals, survivors of the ape Gigantopithecus, thought to be extinct, were still living in North America, having migrated from Asia over the Bering straits.
An adult male, he maintained, stood eight feet tall, weighed 800 pounds and had feet twice the size of a human foot. The animals were nocturnal and lived on carrion, berries and vegetation.
In his later years, Krantz suggested that an effort should be made to shoot a Bigfoot in order to prove the animal was real. But this suggestion enraged American environmentalists, who objected to the idea of killing what, if it existed at all, would presumably be an endangered species.
Grover Krantz was born on November 5 1931 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He studied anthropology at universities in Utah, California and Minnesota.
He joined Washington State University in 1968 as a physical anthropologist, and, over subsequent years published 10 books and more than 60 articles on human anthropology. Among his works were The Antiquity of Race (1981) and The Process of Human Evolution (1982).
Krantz was unconventional in his approach. Once, in order to find out the advantage of huge brow ridges to Homo erectus, he made himself a replica of a homo erectus brow ridge that he strapped above his eyes.
After wearing this device for six months he concluded, from the startled looks of passers by, that the ridge could have been a signalling device.
Krantz, who retired from Washington State University in 1998, was a large, gentle man who loved Irish wolfhounds. He donated his body for scientific research expressing the hope that his skeleton would be mounted for display at the Smithsonian Museum for the edification of fellow anthropologists.
He is survived by his wife, Diana.