Taylor Swift vs Swift Patty: morphological taxonomy and cryptozoology

[JasonPratt]

https://www.instagram.com/p/CszCxZlJ2ZS/



A friend and colleague of mine set this up on his instagram recently.

One of the Taylor Swifts in the photo has the morphological proportions which Taylor Swift shares with all homo sapien hominids, including you and me.

The other figure, Swift Patty let us call her, has the morphological proportions of the female hominid figure striding along swiftly across the Bluff Creek washout terrain in the famous Patterson-Gimlin film footage from the mid-1960s.

This is an illustration of how biologists use taxonomy (before DNA was available) to help them infer which animals share the same species and which don't. Works on wolves vs dachshunds too (as subspecies barely able to interbreed with each other), or wolves vs foxes (as different genuses unable to interbreed with each other).

My friend has been chugging along over the past several years in applying these principles to figure out which figures, where there's doubt, are humans in extensive body-makeup or suits, and which figures (especially moving along) are not even possibly humans in suits. (Facial features can be somewhat disproportioned with enough mask/makeup effects, as with the Planet of the Ape films from the 60s for example -- but not joint proportions compared to spinal column ratios. Or mid-tarsal breaks in the middle of their feet, for that matter.)

His second book on the topic just released -- a rather informal discussion of the topic in form, but still good. (His first book has some good material, too, but some hard stumbles here and there.)

Kindle edition link, though there's also paperback and hardback formats: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C54B14CM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 His extended epilogue on little-seen photographic data from the Dylatov Pass deaths, is worth the $10 by itself, easily.

And to the older book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B096D1VTZ9/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 (No hardback edition, only Kindle and paperback.)

He has been doing good work on sonalysis, too, in recent years, some of which can be visually found in each book, although naturally that's better demonstrated with youtube videos.

[Sir Slash]

Clearly the Swift on the left is a real human being. The one on the right looks like Venom trying to go Trans. Still the concept is intriguing and could be helpful to science in a number of possible ways.

[JasonPratt]

One thing the photo adjustments don't cover, are the differences in shoulder, chest, and waist proportions, and limb-diameter proportions, which he hasn't tested extensively yet, but which make the 'Patty' figure in the famous footage more human-looking. The "Swift Patty" variant shown above looks a lot more inhuman with Taylor's relatively skinny arms etc.