Loren Coleman, director of the International Cryptozoology Museumin Portland, Maine, said Sykes’s finding could be the “number one story in cryptozoology”—the study of hidden, or unverified, animals—”for the decade.”

Coleman, who also appears in the upcoming documentary, said he thinks Sykes’s findings likely explain only one of the Yeti varieties that have been reported.

“That’s one of the problems with the word ‘Yeti,’” Coleman said. “It’s an umbrella term for three different varieties. There’s the small kind, there’s a man-sized type, and then a larger one that is known as Dzu-Teh. I must assume what he’s looking at are samples from the larger-sized one that many of us in the field have speculated was a form of bear.”

The above scaled chart was created by Tyler Stone, and he is to be credited for it. He says it was “culled from other sources.”

If, as Sykes’s findings suggest, the Dzu-Teh is indeed the same species of early polar bear that once roamed the Arctic, it is unlikely to have a white fur coat, as often shown in popular depictions of the Yeti, since it was one of the first polar bears to branch off from brown bears.

That, Coleman said, actually strengthens Sykes’s case that the larger Yeti is an ancient polar bear species.

“It’s one of the myths of the Abominable Snowman and Yeti that they’re white,” Coleman said.

“The native people actually describe them as brown and reddish-brown.”