Some would argue yowies, yetis and sasquatch attract more attention than they deserve, but the search for mythical beasts has led to some very real discoveries.

According to Professor Bill Laurance, James Cook University researcher and holder of an Australian Laureate Fellowship, one of the country's highest scientific awards, legend-hunters have a place in the scientific community.

"These people that go out and look for this stuff sometimes find some amazing things," Professor Laurance said.

"There's been so-called 'Lazarus species' — things that have risen up from the dead or that we thought were long ago extinct — that have been found.

"One of the most famous examples is the coelacanth, the fish we thought had been dead since the time of the dinosaurs.

Coelacanths were thought to be extinct until a species of the fish was discovered off the coast of South Africa in 1938. ( Laurent Ballest/www.andronelle.ocean.com/www.blancpain-ocean-commitment.com )

"There's the Wollemi Pine which was thought to have disappeared a couple of hundred-million years ago [and] was discovered just a stone's throw from Sydney."

Professor Laurance said there were too many species that had been re-discovered to warrant belittling people who went in search of the mysterious.

"There's so much we still don't know, there's so many things we're discovering all the time and I think it's a little arrogant to suggest that we know everything, because we don't," he said.

That being said, Professor Laurance does not believe in yowies, bigfoot, or any other regional derivative of the species.

"I hate to pour water on the party but there's a vanishingly small chance that something of that size could go unnoticed for this long," he said.

"Even in the deep Amazon, it'd be difficult to imagine something like that going completely undetected."

Tree-dwelling tricksters

While conducting fieldwork for his PhD Professor Laurance gained firsthand knowledge of just how pervasive monster legends could be.

In the Maalan area, about 80 kilometres south of Cairns in far north Queensland, locals tell the story of a logger who was so terrified by the sight of a giant monster in the forest he refused to ever return.

Professor Laurance said he too had had experiences with things that went bump in the night.

Tree kangaroos are easily spooked and can be surprisingly loud when moving through the rainforest. ( Supplied: Dreamworld )

"I never saw any yowies, but I did encounter a number of tree kangaroos," he said.

"When they're frightened tree kangaroos have this habit of crashing down out of the tree and then they go bounding loudly away.

"If you didn't know what you you were seeing or hearing, I can imagine that being pretty frightening."

Science versus silliness

While he has a lot of time for so-called 'fringe scientists', Professor Laurance said they walked a fine line between being accepted and ostracised.

"There have been some people that have really invested a lot of time in what other scientists consider 'fringe activities', and there's a couple of well-known examples," he said.

"A professor at Washington State University spent something like $50,000 of his own money to buy a small aeroplane [and] thermal imaging equipment trying to find a bigfoot or a sasquatch — he was looked down on by his colleagues.

"Another well-known academic at the University of Chicago was actually fired because he was spending a lot of time looking for this sort of aquatic dinosaur that supposedly lived in the Congo basin."

Wollemi pines are one of the oldest and rarest trees in the world and were thought to be extinct until they were rediscovered in the Blue Mountains in 1994. ( Reuters )

According to Professor Laurance, it is human nature to believe in the existence of mysterious animals and if that natural curiosity led to more mainstream discoveries, he would be one happy scientist.

"The bottom line is there's some cool stuff yet to be discovered," he said.

"If somebody tells me they've been kidnapped by flying saucers, that's getting a little too far out on the fringes for my comfort zone.

"But for people who want to find these mystery animals, I think more power to them."