Scientists say that Yeti you saw was really just a bear

Bruce the Yeti.
(Image credit: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

In news no one was Yeti for, scientists say there is no such thing as the Abominable Snowman, and people who claim to have seen one of the creatures actually just spotted a bear.

The killjoys from the University of Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences wrote in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B that their findings suggest "Yetis" are three different bears that live in the Himalayas: the Asian black, Tibetan brown, and Himalayan brown. Researchers were given access to bone fragments and samples of skin, hair, and feces that were said to be from Yetis, and found that they were the remains of 23 different bears, Agence France-Presse reports. The team reconstructed the mitochondrial genomes of the bears, and determined that the brown bears at the top of the Tibetan Plateau and brown bears in the western Himalayan mountains are two separate populations.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.