A professor at Idaho State University, he said he didn’t ‘believe’ the creature exists. He said he concluded it exists.

Jeffrey Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University in Pocatello, liked to begin his scholarly talks with a long and fastidious primer on human evolution before finally pivoting to his real subject: Bigfoot.

Meldrum didn’t talk about Bigfoot the way supermarket tabloids do, as some enigmatic loner in the woods, but as just another species of wildlife—a “relic hominid,” he called it: a branch of our own bushy family tree, like Neanderthals or Homo floresiensis, but one which never went extinct and, being rather rare, is still just lumbering around, eluding us.

Analyzing 3-D scans of casts of alleged Bigfoot tracks during a lecture at the 2014 Yakima Big Foot Round-Up in Yakima, Wash., for example, Meldrum noted that those footprints were clearly different from human prints, but all similar to each other. They shared “a very distinct morphology of the forefoot,” he said, and a conspicuous flexibility in the middle, common in apes. “There are expansion cracks, as you can see, as that substrate has heaved up to relieve pressure that has concentrated under the forefoot during the latter part of the stance,” he said.

His contention was, essentially, that these three footprints—discovered on two continents over three decades—were either real evidence of a real Bigfoot, or some incredibly long-running and almost pointlessly sophisticated hoax, designed with the specificity to trick someone exactly like him: Jeffrey Meldrum, Ph.D. in anatomical sciences, specializing in the evolution of hominid bipedalism—that is, how upright creatures walk—and co-editor of the book “From Biped to Strider: The Emergence of Modern Human Walking, Running, and Resource Transfer.”

Meldrum, who died of brain cancer on Sept. 9 at age 67, was seemingly the only, and certainly the most prominent, tenured academic to study Bigfoot. Well-credentialed and disarmingly mild-mannered, he was both the most straight-laced guest on Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot” reality series and one of the most peculiar on NPR’s Science Friday. Jane Goodall, who herself believed in Bigfoot, praised Meldrum’s book, “Sasquatch: Legends Meet Science,” as bringing a “much needed level of scientific analysis” to the issue.

Meldrum didn’t use the word “believe” when it came to Bigfoot; belief was unscientific. “I’m not out to proselytize that Bigfoot exists,” he told the Associated Press in 2006. “I place legend under scrutiny and my conclusion is, absolutely, Bigfoot exists.”

He is survived by his wife, Lauren Vaughan Stewart, six children and three stepchildren.

A pet praying mantis

Don Jeffrey Meldrum was born in Salt Lake City on May 24, 1958, the oldest of three children, and grew up largely in Eugene, Ore., and Spokane, Wash., hunting butterflies and snakes in the woods. His childhood pets included a praying mantis and a skunk.

When Meldrum was 10, he accompanied his father and brother to a screening of the so-called Patterson-Gimlin film, a 1967 home movie shot by two ranchers that captured, briefly, a Bigfoot loping across a dry creek bed. It’s foundational footage, birthing the archetypical shaggy, arm-swinging Sasquatch silhouette that has been replicated on countless T-shirts and beer cozies.

Captivated by the film, Meldrum started reading about the creature, typing out passages from library books on his mother’s typewriter to assemble his own research archive. In sixth grade, he wrote a paper about Bigfoot for a unit on primates in science class.

But gradually, Meldrum moved on to conventional science. He received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology at Brigham Young University, pausing his studies to serve a two-year Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission in Germany, and earned a Ph.D. in anatomical sciences from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1989. He taught at Duke University Medical Center and Northwestern University Medical School before landing at Idaho State in 1993.

Bigfoot ambled back into Meldrum’s life three years later, when an amateur investigator asked Meldrum to inspect fresh footprints alongside a muddy road in the Blue Mountains of eastern Washington. Meldrum arrived prepared to debunk the whole thing, but examining the tracks—about 35 footprints, each about 16 inches long—he was “flabbergasted,” he later said.

Meldrum thought of Grover Krantz, a Washington State University anthropologist whose reputation within academia suffered as he emerged as part of a well-known group of pioneering Bigfoot researchers in the 1960s and ’70s nicknamed the “Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery.”

Contemplating those tracks in the Blue Mountains, Meldrum told the Deseret News, “There was actually this little moment where this angel sits on my shoulder and says, ‘Do you really want to go down this path?’ and the devil on the other shoulder says, ‘How could you not?’ ”

Like studying SpongeBob

Throwing himself into Bigfootdom, Meldrum built up a collection of more than 300 casts of footprints in his lab and produced an open-source library of 3-D scans for other researchers to examine. He sent hair samples that he and other investigators collected to colleagues for genetic sequencing (without definitive results) and conducted his own fieldwork in remote wildernesses for weeks at a time, funded by a private donor. He wrote papers like “Ichonotaxonomy of Giant Hominid Tracks in North America” for niche websites and journals.

Meldrum thought it was a shame that science had ceded the question of Bigfoot to “amateur fortune seekers or enthusiasts, or those that thought [Bigfoot] was left here by UFOs or traveled through interdimensional portals,” he told the podcaster Joe Rogan. “I’ve got to get out of the room when someone starts talking energy and crystals—I’m allergic to it,” he said.

Meldrum taught only conventional science classes at Idaho State, though the creature became almost exclusively the focus of his research, creating some embarrassment and friction at the school. In 2006, Newsday described Meldrum being “lambasted by colleagues” (“One could do deep-ocean research for SpongeBob SquarePants. That doesn’t make it science,” one told the paper) and the Associated Press reported that 30 professors signed a petition criticizing the university for hosting a Bigfoot symposium at which Meldrum spoke.

For the Bigfoot faithful, this alleged alienation within academia was a badge of honor, though Meldrum occasionally insisted that story line was exaggerated. Janet Loxterman, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State, said: “He was a well-liked member of our department. He wasn’t an in-your-face, argumentative person, and I think by and large the faculty here felt he was a very good colleague, even if they may not have appreciated his research focus.”

Within the Bigfoot community, meanwhile, Meldrum was revered. “This subject has always been a light that attracts a lot of strange moths,” explained Cliff Barackman, an amateur researcher and founder of a Bigfoot museum in Boring, Ore. “But Dr. Meldrum was such a conservative, sober representative of the subject”—his stature and seriousness legitimized everyone else’s passion. “Even his harshest critics couldn’t say that he was an idiot or a lunatic,” Barackman went on. “They could only say they thought he was incorrect.”

Barackman and other Bigfoot investigators also praised the generosity Meldrum demonstrated at the conferences he regularly attended. He dove freely into conversations with total novices and answered even the most ill-informed questions at length. Bill Munns said, “People on the fanatic fringe might come up to him with some crazy theory, and he could correct them without being patronizing. He was a gentleman.”

These interactions weren’t a chore which Meldrum managed to endure graciously; he sincerely enjoyed them. He told Rogan he could never regret the time he’d devoted to his Bigfoot research, no matter the ultimate outcome. “It’s been a great ride. I’ve gotten to…see some of the most beautiful landscapes and terrain, and meet all kinds of interesting people.”

According to Barackman, the one question Meldrum got constantly was: When do you think we’ll see definitive proof. “And Dr. Meldrum would always say, ‘It could happen today, it could happen tomorrow. I just want it to happen in my lifetime.’ Unfortunately, he missed the mark on that one.”