Richard Melville ’54 has influenced a number of worlds, from international finance to Asian history to cultural preservation.
He was instrumental in protecting Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex from U.S. bombs during the Vietnam War. He helped bring "capitalism with a socialist face" to mainland China and authored and pushed the International Banking Act of 1978 through Congress. For a time he was the personal financial advisor to Cambodian chief of state Norodom Sihanouk.
But Melville's proudest accomplishment falls into a discipline covered more by the Weekly World News than the Wall Street Journal: cryptozoology, the study of legendary animal species.
Recently, Melville helped debunk the existence of the "khting vor," a mythical snake-eating bovine of Cambodia. Its scientific name is Pseudonovibos spiralis, but Melville has a more accurate description: "The fourth great hoax fostered on zoology and natural history" — the big three being the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the yeti.
In 1994, German scientists brought forth distinctive animal horns, proof they said that the khting vor really did live in the Cambodian jungle. Other scientists agreed, and soon the creature was on the Red List, a registry of threatened species maintained by the International Union of Conservation Nations.
An experienced Cambodian traveler and author of Northeast Forest: Field Notes on the Hilltribes and Fauna of Cambodia, 1959-1962, Melville thought it sounded more like bull than ox. His theory: The horns were cow horns altered by craftspeople. In 2001, the two sides butted heads in the Journal of Zoology of London. Ultimately, the expert who first proposed the beast for the Red List backed down, and the khting vor could soon be dropped from the list altogether.
For Melville, taking down this potential sacred cow transcends intellectual sport. "Wildlife conservation was going to be seriously jeopardized if a hoax was allowed to dirty the good work" of such organizations as the World Wildlife Fund, he said.
Richard Melville died on Jan. 1, 2005, at his home in Bristol, Maine.
