Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant, a form of apophenia. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.

…Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, seeing patterns in random data. Source.

There is even a previous infamous case for this business in the fossil realm:

From the late 1970s through the early 1980s, Japanese researcher Chonosuke Okamura self-published a famous series of reports titled “Original Report of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory” in which he described tiny inclusions in polished limestone from the Silurian period (425 mya) as being preserved fossil remains of tiny humans, gorillas, dogs, dragons, dinosaurs, and other organisms, all of them only millimeters long, leading him to claim “There have been no changes in the bodies of mankind since the Silurian period … except for a growth in stature from 3.5 mm to 1,700 mm.” Okamura’s research earned him a winner of the Ig Nobel Prize (a parody of the Nobel Prizes) in biodiversity.Source.

I’d say Mr. May is on his way to winning the Ig Nobel Prize for 2013 with this “fossilized Bigfoot skull” story.

Of course, within Bigfoot online discussions, the ultimate form of pareidolia is the blobsquatch. See my “The Short History of Blobsquatch,” for more. See example, above.

This “Bigfoot skull” one is almost as awful as the “Bigfoot was photographed on Mars” story (see below).

During the discussions of the “Bluff Creek Bigfoot Massacre,” needless to say, people were, via pareidolia, seeing some things in the woods that surely were not there. One example is shown below:

But it is not just Mr. May’s fault or others who present such material. The media is responsible in this silliness too. Where is the critical thinking tools of responsible journalism anymore? Again, come on!

For cryptozoologists, it is just downright embarrassing that we have to even react to this kind of reportage, as if it is worthy of our time. Let’s get back to serious Sasquatch research, please.