Grover Sanders Krantz was an American anthropologist and cryptozoologist; he was one of few scientists not only to research Bigfoot, but to express his belief in the animal's existence.
21 Facts About Grover Krantz
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However, Grover Krantz was tenacious in his work and was often drawn to controversial subjects, such as the Kennewick Man remains, arguing for their preservation and study.
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Grover Krantz has been described as having been the "only scientist" and "lone professional" to seriously consider Bigfoot in his time, in a field largely dominated by amateur naturalists.
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Grover Krantz's parents were devout Mormons, and while Krantz tried to follow the basic Christian philosophy of behaviour and morality, he was not active in the religion.
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Grover Krantz was raised in Rockford, Illinois until the age of 10, when his family relocated back to Utah.
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Grover Krantz attended the University of Utah for a year beginning in 1949 before joining the Air National Guard, where he served as a desert survival instructor at Clovis, New Mexico from 1951 to 1952.
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Grover Krantz then transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed a Bachelor of Science degree in 1955 and a Master's degree in 1958.
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Grover Krantz was a popular professor despite giving notoriously difficult exams, and often ate lunch with students and talked about anthropology, unified field theory in physics, military history, and current events.
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Grover Krantz wrote an influential paper on the emergence of humans in prehistoric Europe and the development of Indo-European languages, and was the first researcher to explain the function of the mastoid process.
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In 1996 Grover Krantz was drawn into the Kennewick Man controversy, arguing both in academia and in court that direct lineage to extant human populations could not be demonstrated.
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Grover Krantz theorized that sightings were due to small pockets of surviving gigantopithecines, with the progenitor population having migrated across the Bering land bridge, which was later used by humans to enter North America.
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In January 1985 Krantz tried to formally name Bigfoot by presenting a paper at the meeting of the International Society of Cryptozoology held in Sussex, England, assigning it the binomen Gigantopithecus blacki, although this was not permitted by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature because G blacki was an existing taxon and because the creature was lacking a holotype.
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Grover Krantz then tried to have his paper, titled "A Species Named from Footprints," published in an academic journal although it was rejected by reviewers.
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Grover Krantz had one brother, Victor Krantz, who worked as a photographer at the Smithsonian Institution.
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Grover Krantz married his fourth wife, Diane Horton, on November 5,1982.
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Grover Krantz was a road enthusiast and frequently took road trips, traveling to all 48 continental states.
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On March 3,1987, Grover Krantz debated Duane Gish on creationism and evolution at Washington State University; the well-publicized three-hour debate was attended by more than 1000 people.
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On Valentine's Day 2002, Grover Krantz died in his Port Angeles, Washington home from pancreatic cancer after an eight-month battle with the disease.
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In 2009, Grover Krantz's skeleton was painstakingly articulated and, along with the skeleton of one of his dogs, included on display in the Smithsonian's "Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake" exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History.
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Grover Krantz's bones have been used to teach forensics and advanced osteology to George Washington University students.
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Grover Krantz spent a year documenting his life's work in her podcast, Wild Thing, and later a children's book, The Search for Sasquatch.