Odd beasty photographed in Pennsylvania.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,307020,00.html
More photos–
http://www.bfro.net/avevid/jacobs/jacobs_photos.asp
Personally?
I think that somebody dumped a chimpanzee in the woods.
Maybe Professor Lupin forgot to take his potion again.
I don’t see anything in those photos that makes me think it isn’t a bear. To my eye, it’s quite clearly not a primate. This is pretty decisively shown in the third photo by the shape of the forefeet. Also, the front legs and hind legs are about the same length. This doesn’t fit either a bipedal humanoid like Sasquatch is supposed to be, or any extant ape.
Admittedly, it’s a bear that probably doesn’t get a lot of dates.
No, it’s ManBearPig!!. I’m super-super serial here, why won’t anyone believe me!
It is obviously a bear. Mrs. Plant and her dog saw one on Pennsylvania once.
Options:
New tourism slogan: “You’ve got a fiend in Pennsylvania.”
Werewolf to travel agent: “You idiot! I said Transylvania, not Pennsylvania!”
Seriously, there is a clear behind shot and Creature X has no signs of having even a short bear tail. I believe it is either a primate or a new species of tailless bear.
Or ManBearPig…
okay, i’ll stop now 
That’s why I finally left western PA. Too many goddamned feral chimpanzees. You need to take an axe handle with you every time you go out to get the paper. There’d be six or eight of them out on the lawn screaming and hollering at 3 AM very damn morning, like clockwork. Chimp turds took the paint right off my Buick.
On the other hand, there’s a slim chance that it could just be a bear. Every so often you’ll hear reports of bears in Allegheny National Forest, at least in the few areas that haven’t yet been taken over by chimpanzees. One might also regard the significance of the Pennsylvania Game Commission identifying the mystery animal as a bear, and the fact that bear cubs were photographed in the exact same spot, as possibly contributing additional evidence that the animal is in fact a bear.
Probably the best strategy to determine its identity would be to locate a picture of a mangy bear, and see if there is any resemblance.
Buck season’s coming up, so I fully expect to hear stories about the “Allegheny Ape” from my relatives within a month.
That’s not Western Pennsylvania, that’s Yale U.
I left Yale?! Boy that explains a lot. Except how I got there in the first place… Maybe I was drunk. Must ask Mumsy and Popsy about that one of these days.
Speaking of wandering around drunk, I find the Bigfoot Field Researchers Org’s screed about the PA Game Commission to be mildly fascinating. I’d never heard about the conspiracy to suppress knowledge of Pennsylvania’s native mountain lion population. As a resident of Florida (or is it Princeton?), where the state panther population hovers around the double digits, about a third of which are fitted with radio tracking collars, I can’t help but notice that they still manage to wind up dead on the highways at the rate of about one a month. Evidently the elusive Pennsylvania Panther shares the same uncanny instincts as the Allegheny Ape for avoiding roads, cannibalizing its dead, and somehow managing to not get shot by hordes of gun-happy Pennsylvanians.
Terrifel’s mangy bear looked more like the pic than the mangy bear provided on the site. The limbs look too straight to me, but the pic isn’t a great one.
Well it’s not MY mangy bear. I mean, it’s just A mangy bear. It does not belong to me.
My favorite part of that photo is the other bear in the background. I imagine he’s staring at the bear with mange and thinking “Oh. My. God.”
I think we all know what he’s really thinking: “I, for one, welcome our new simian overlords.”