The TBRC is pleased to announce that Dr. Ian Redmond and Dr. Jeff Meldrum will give presentations at the 2011 Texas Bigfoot Conference, scheduled for October 1, 2011. Dr. Redmond will be the keynote speaker for the evening banquet immediately following the conference.
Dr. Redmond is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost field biologists, renowned for his decades of work with elephants and mountain gorillas. The recipient of numerous honors, he served as Ambassador for the UN’s Year of the Gorilla 2009 and for the UNEP Convention on Migratory Species since 2010. He serves as a consultant for organizations such as the Born Free Foundation, the Gorilla Organization, the Orangutan Foundation, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare. He established and chairs the Ape Alliance (eighty organizations linked via www.4apes.com), the African Ele-Fund, and the UK Rhino Group (www.rhinogroup.org.uk). He is the Chief Consultant and Envoy for GRASP – the UNEP/UNESCO Great Apes Survival Partnership, an organization he helped launch in 2001.
Born in Malaysia, Redmond’s passion for animals developed during his boyhood in Beverley, a market town in Yorkshire. In 1976, after attending Keele University, Redmond joined Dr. Dian Fossey in studying and protecting the mountain gorillas of Rwanda and Zaire. This work also led him into documentary filmmaking. He introduced Sir David Attenborough to gorillas in 1978 for the famous BBC Life on Earth sequences, and he coached Sigourney Weaver for her award-winning role in the film Gorillas in the Mist (1987). He has been an advisor for or has appeared in more than fifty documentary films for the BBC, National Geographic Society, Discovery Channel, TF1, etc. In 2011 he was a featured scientist in the History cable channel documentary Bigfoot: The Definitive Guide.
Dr. Redmond’s books have been translated into many languages and he is in demand as an entertaining and thought-provoking public speaker. Do not miss this rare opportunity to meet and learn from this distinguished scientist.
Dr. Meldrum is a physical anthropologist at Idaho State University and an affiliate curator for the Idaho Museum of Natural History. His research is centered on vertebrate—particularly primate—evolutionary morphology. His formal study of primates began with doctoral research on terrestrial adaptations in African primates, and has since taken him from the dusty skeletal cabinets of far-flung museums to the remote badlands of Colombia and Argentina in search of fossil New World primates, and to Asia to investigate intriguing reports of unknown primates. He has published extensively on the evolutionary history of the South American primates and has described several new extinct species. He has documented varied primate locomotor specializations in laboratory and semi-natural settings. More recently his attention has returned to the emergence of modern human bipedalism. His co-edited volume, From Biped to Strider: the Emergence of Modern Human Walking, Running, and Resource Transport, proposes a more recent innovation of modern striding gait than previously assumed.
As the acting director of the Center for Motion Analysis and Biomechanics (CMAB) Dr. Meldrum is collaborating with engineers, paleontologists, and the Idaho Virtualization Lab, to model the pattern of evolution of the hominid foot skeleton. His interests also encompass the evaluation of the footprints purportedly left by an unrecognized North American ape, commonly known as the sasquatch. He has authored an expanded companion volume to the very successful Discovery Channel documentary, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. He is widely considered as one of the world’s foremost authorities regarding possible sasquatch-related evidence. He has discovered tracks and has experienced probable sasquatch encounters. His laboratory includes a large collection of sasquatch foot castings.
The 2011 Texas Bigfoot Conference will be held in Tyler, Texas, October 1, 2011, 9:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. The conference will be at the Caldwell Auditorium. The address is:
Caldwell Auditorium
300 S. College Ave.
Tyler, TX 75702
(903) 262-2300
The fundraiser banquet dinner will be from 7:30 P.M to 9:00 P.M. with a special presentation by world-renowned field biologist Dr. Ian Redmond. The dinner will be held at the Tyler Discovery Science Place. The address is:
Discovery Science Place
308 N. Broadway Ave.
Tyler, TX 75702
(903) 533-8011
