Denis Alexandrov, 12, noticed the alleged sign of Bigfoot on an early morning walk with other children close to his tent in the mountainous Shorsky National Park in Kemerovo region.

The print was twice the size of a man's foot, said his father Andrei, 49.

'I'm into hunting so I understand a bit about footprints,' said Andrei, who claimed he did not believe in the Yeti before he witnessed the giant mark in clay.

'We went to the place were the kids saw the footprint and the only thing I can say was, "I now know it exists".

The creature must have been very tall,' he told The Siberian Times, 'The edges of the footprint were sharp, which means the creature left the footprint not too long ago.'

The Big Foot print resembled a human's, it was claimed.

It had been raining in the night and the campers, who were on a boat trip on remote Mras-Su River, did not hear any strange noises.

Despite their claims, none of the campers are thought to have actually seen the beast itself. It is the second Yeti claim in the region this summer.

Artist and sculptor Andrey Lyubchenko drew a picture of a Yeti that he claimed to have met while out walking in the early morning on 27 July.

He said: 'It happened so unexpectedly and fast that I had no time to get scared.'

'There was a clear feeling that this was a thinking creature, I felt he was trying to 'talk' to me.

'The Yeti was about two and a half metres tall, with thick dark brown hair like a bear's - but a lot softer.

'He was holding a wooden stick, with bits of hair wrapped around it. But the main thing was his eyes, they were just like light-coloured human eyes.'

Kemerovo region is famed for sightings of Yeti, though some have been proven to be hoaxes.

Yeti hunter Igor Burtsev - head of the Russian International Centre of Hominology, based in Kemerovo region - estimated that as many as 30 Yetis roam this part of Russia.

Another claim suggested 200 of the fabled creatures in southern Siberia.

Bryan Sykes, Fellow of Wolfson College, and former Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, tested three samples of suspected Yeti hair from Kemerovo in 2013.

His DNA tests established that the hair was from a horse, a raccoon and an American Black Bear. The latter two are not native to Russia.

In March, a key piece of evidence which claimed the sightings were down to an unknown type of bear in the Himalaya was ruled out.

Scientists looked into claims that hair samples - apparently belonging to the Yeti - actually belonged to undiscovered species of bear.

Unfortunately the hair samples had degraded to the point that it was impossible to link them to any bear species.

The researchers concluded from the colour and shape of the hair samples, that they were likely to have come from common Himalayan brown bears. 

(dailymail.co.uk)