Bigfoot and Cryptozoology

Time: 2:00PM

Location: C2-28 Lecture Room, Center for Business and Industry, Community College of Philadelphia

Monster hunting, or Cryptozoology, is often consigned to the realm of pseudoscience, and pursued by amateurs such as those on the television series Finding Bigfoot. There is, however, a long history of mainstream scientists and naturalists who engaged with monsters as a way to understand human heredity, biological diversity, and evolution. In this lecture, Dr. Brian Regal will look at the history of academic monster hunting and how it became marginalized. He will use the life of the controversial paleoanthropologist Grover Krantz as a vehicle to examine this topic.

Dr. Brian Regal teaches the history of science at Kean University. He is a Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London, and has lectured and presented papers to scholarly conferences and popular presentations across the US, the UK, and Germany. In addition to scholarly works on the history of evolutionary biology, he has written Op-Ed pieces for The Star-Ledger and The Guardian, and has appeared in USA Today, Science, the Times of India, and the Wall Street Journal. His most recent book is Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology (2013).