Those peo­ple up in Tes­lin, Yukon Ter­ri­tory who claim to have seen Big­foot say that they found a clump of Ye Olde Large Foot’s hair and geneti­cists at the Uni­ver­sity of Alberta are going to test it.

Cana­dian sci­en­tists are per­form­ing DNA tests on a tuft of hair said to come from a sasquatch, a leg­endary ape-like crea­ture also known as Bigfoot.Geneticists at the Uni­ver­sity of Alberta have been given the hair by wit­nesses who say it came from the mys­te­ri­ous animal.

The res­i­dents of a Yukon town say they saw the crea­ture ear­lier this month.

The sci­en­tists say they think it unlikely that the hair belongs to a giant ape.

Wit­nesses in Tes­lin say they saw a tall, ape-like crea­ture lope past a house in the mid­dle of the night, leav­ing behind large foot­prints and a clump of hair.

What’s nice about this story is that the geneti­cists, while 100% skep­ti­cal, are will­ing to go along with it. Shows that sci­ence nerds aren’t all fudds.

Geneti­cist David Colt­man says his team will run mod­ern DNA tests on the sam­ple and com­pare the results to the DNA of large ani­mals that are well-known here, such as bears and bison.He says the fur is almost cer­tainly from a well-known mam­mal but he admits it is pos­si­ble it will not match any known species.

That, he says, would be sci­en­tif­i­cally inter­est­ing and that chance is worth run­ning these tests for.

I’ll be keep­ing my eye on this one.