article_snippet: Biologists used DNA analysis to examine claims that hair samples attributed to yetis appeared to belong to a scientifically undiscovered species of bear.
article_snippet: Instead Biologists have found that the DNA in the hair samples has degraded making it impossible to attribute Biologists to any species of bear.
article_snippet: The researchers conclude, however, that from the colour and shape of the hair samples, The researchers were likely to have come from common Himalayan brown bears rather than an unknown species of bear.
article_snippet: Dr Eliécer Gutiérrez, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Institution, said one of the hair samples had apparently come from a bear that had been shot by hunters.
article_snippet: Don Whillans said: 'Dr Eliécer Gutiérrez, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Institution have concluded that there is no reason to believe that the two samples came from anything other than Brown Bears. '
article_snippet: In 2014 Professor Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at the University of Oxford, found that DNA extracted two samples of 'yeti' hair from the Himalaya were a 100 per cent match with a 40,000 year old fossil polar bear but not to modern species of polar bear.
article_snippet: However, subsequent analysis by researchers from the University of Copenhagen found that the hair was not from a polar bear.
article_snippet: Professor Sykes and his colleagues maintained, however, that the hair samples must be from an otherwise unknown species of bear living in the Himalaya.
article_snippet: Although no DNA match was found researchers from the University of Copenhagen say no DNA match is likely yeti hair samples came from a brown bear .
article_snippet: Now Dr Gutiérrez and Dr Ronald Pine, a zoologist at the University of Kansas, have found that the DNA from yeti hair samples cannot be assigned to any species of bear.
article_snippet: : The BBC reported that hairs collected in North-East India were tested, but results about what creature what creature came from were inconclusive .
article_snippet: The only way forward, as I have repeatedly said, is to find a living bear that matches the 12S RNA and and study fresh material from the 12S RNA. '
article_snippet: Twenty eight of these two hairs were genetic matches to known animals from bears to racoons, horses and cows.
article_snippet: these two hairs DNA matched that recovered from a 40,000-year-old polar bear fossil.
article_snippet: Researchers Ross Barnett, from the University of Copenhagen, and Ceiridwen Edwards from the University of Oxford proposed that the previously unexplained samples come from the Himalayan bear - a sub-species of the brown bear that lives in the higher reaches of the Himalayas, in remote, mountainous areas of Pakistan, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and India.
article_snippet: new research, however, concludes that it is difficult to attribute the DNA to any species of bear.
highlights_snippet: Scientists had claimed DNA from yeti hair found in the Himalaya matched the genetic sequence from a fossil polar bear that died 40,000 years ago .
  
highlights_snippet: Scientists claimed that the hair may belong to an undiscovered species of bear .
  
highlights_snippet: The new research concludes the hair may belong to a common brown bear .
  