The Search for the Yeti!

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The publicity surrounding the 1953 conquest of Everest focused attention on the footprint photographed two years previously by Eric Shipton. Around the world, people seriously speculated that the strange footprint had been made by a totally unknown giant ape-man. The leading suspect for a real animal among those who hunted the yeti was an extinct creature called Gigantopithecus (still the favorite guess of cryptozoologists--those who search for unknown animals).

First discovered during the 1930s in Chinese medicine shops (where fossils were often used to make medical potions), teeth from Gigantopithecus had revealed that Asia was once the home of an enormous ape--perhaps one …