June 05, 2008-Thimphu: For a generation that grew up listening to Yeti stories, this may be nothing new.

But the British media will be excited about Bhutan as the Land of the Thunder Dragon exhibition in the Derbyshire village of Oaker in England begins on June 9.

A British artist, who was in the country last year, has produced a sketch of the Yeti based on “potentially explosive” new evidence of the elusive creature’s existence, reports the British newspaper, The Telegraph.

Polyanna Pickering, 65, a renowned wildlife artist, who has modeled her art gallery as a lhakhang, said she saw the scalp of the mythical creature at a monastery near Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary in Trashigang.

“It had tufts of reddish-black fur coming out of it and was mounted on a pole and seen as a holy relic,” she said.

Though photography is banned, the artist was allowed to make a rough sketch of the scalp.

She also produced a full sketch of the creature, based on scores of eyewitness accounts by people, the paper reports.

Jonathan Downes, director of the Center of Fortean Zoology, which studies mystery animals, said: “If this is true it is the most important zoological discovery in 70 years. This is potentially explosive.”

He said the discovery was unique because the scalp still had a portion of bone attached to it. He added though other Yeti scalps have been found before, this is the only one with a bone attached. The others turned out to be man-made.

The artist said people in the area described of regular sightings, close encounters and even people being carried off by the Yeti.

The scalp was housed in a part of the monastery closed to visitors, according to her account.

The old search

In 2001, scientists with a British TV documentary crew claimed they found a clump of hair in a cedar tree in Trashigang which could be those of the legendary Yeti.

The April 2, 2001, issue of The Times, London, quoted a ‘local Yeti-hunter and guide’ from Bhutan who said the tree was the animal’s den.

On returning to Britain, the team handed the hair to Oxford geneticists for analysis.

“It’s not a human, it’s not a bear, nor anything else that we’ve so far been able to identify,” the paper quoted Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the Oxford Institute of Molecular Medicine, one of the world’s leading experts on DNA analysis.

“We found some DNA in it, but we don’t know what it is. It’s not a human, not a bear nor anything else we have so far been able to identify. It’s a mystery and I never thought this would end in a mystery. We have never encountered DNA that we couldn’t recognize before,” he said.

But recent stories of the Yeti scalp have not gone well with all.

Although the scientific community largely dismisses the Yeti as a fraud supported by legend and weak evidence, it remains one of the most famous creatures of cryptozoology - the study of unconfirmed animals.

Skeptics say the account of Polyanna Pickering is just a stunt to attract media attention to her exhibition.

The artist, who was supported by the Canada-based society, Artists for Conservation Foundation, spent six weeks trekking in Bhutan in the spring of 2007.  

“Although I did not see a Yeti myself, having trekked through this region I could not be certain that they don’t exist,” Pollyanna Pickering commented on her website.

A full exhibition of her paintings will also be shown in New York in association with the Worldwide Nature Artists Group.

Yeti was an official protected species in Nepal until the late 1950s.  “Someone obviously believes in them,” said Lama Surya Das, one of the foremost American lamas in the Buddhist tradition and author of Wisdom Tales from Tibet.

But he dismissed accounts of Yeti sightings as figments of imagination.

Explorers from around the world have spent billions of dollars in search of the snowman. But one Yeti mission stands out because of the person who commissioned it.

Adolph Hitler sent a member of his special force, Professor Ernst Schaefer, to search for the Yeti in the hope that it would turn out to be the progenitor of the Aryan race.

The professor, after his mission, concluded that the Yeti was the Tibetan bear, but kept this theory to himself.

 “If I had said this to the Nazis, they would have killed me,” he reportedly said.