In Jurassic Park, fictional scientists extract dinosaur DNA from the blood meals of ancient mosquitoes entombed in amber. Ray Harwood's real-life work doesn't deal with amber, but the premise is strikingly similar: locate blood-fed insects in wild habitats, extract whatever DNA they contain, and analyze it for known and unknown vertebrate species.
Harwood and his team have collected thousands of mosquitoes, ticks, and deer flies from remote areas of Montana, Washington, and Florida—regions with active Bigfoot sighting reports. Each insect is carefully preserved, catalogued, and eventually sent to a lab where molecular biologists extract the genetic material from the blood inside.
The results? So far, many blood meals have returned expected hits: deer, elk, raccoon, bear, coyote, and yes—human. But occasionally, sequences appear that don’t quite match anything in public DNA databases. Could these anomalies be degraded DNA? Unknown primates? Or just technical noise?
That mystery is precisely what keeps Harwood going.