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Jimmy Chilcutt is a latent fingerprint expert who has concluded that some of the Bigfoot casts he has examined are likely to be from an unrecognized primate species.
Chilcutt was a recognized expert by various law enforcement agencies (FBI, DEA and so on), partially because of his ability to find prints missed by others.
He wanted to expand the probable information that could be derived from those prints: age, gender, and other variables that would be useful to the agents with whom he was working.
This led him to fingerprinting other primate species, to gain more insight into the nature of fingerprints.
In December of 1998, he happened to hear Jeff Meldrum refer to "dermal ridges" in a Bigfoot cast. He was intrigued enough to want to examine the cast. He has stated that he was initially skeptical, but that it would be an interesting exercise. He did conclude that the prints on the cast Meldrum had shown were human fingerprints, leading him to believe it was a hoax.
In examining more of the casts in Meldrum's collection, Chilcutt found some with characteristics that pointed to a non-human origin. Some ridges ran lengthwise (along the toe to heel axis) rather than from side-to-side, as would be expected in a homo sapiens foot. Some of the ridges were also abnormally large.
This led Chilcutt to conclude that some of them were genuine Bigfoot footprint castings.
Skeptics have not tended to question Chilcutt's credentials (although the fact that he is retired has been cited by some as a reason that there might be a monetary motive for his statements). They have also proposed that the castings might have been prepared in a way that was different than Chilcutt is used to examining, and therefore might have created some false anomalies that he would not have anticipated.
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