Edition: U.S. / Global

Phnom Penh Journal; Cambodia's Mystery, the Horns That Never Were

Published: May 6, 2002

Nobody is quite sure what it is cow, goat, antelope, gazelle -- a mysterious creature that is said to roam the hidden mountain ranges of Cambodia.

But the shape of its horns is well known: curved and curlicued with a distinctive twining ridge like the stripe on a candy cane. The horns have been diplayed in marketplaces and trophy cases around the country.

For years, tales have emerged from Cambodia's hidden mountain ranges of this strange animal known as the khting vor (commonly pronounced KIT-ting voar). Some mountain people say it eats snakes. Some say it can leap like a mountain goat. Some swear that it is a roaring, savage predator.

Now for the first time, after decades of warfare in Cambodia, the habitat of the khting vor is safe to explore and the hunt for the elusive beast is on. After three years of searching, what people have found is: nothing.

''This is the only documented mammal that we know exists but that has never been seen by outsiders,'' said Hunter Weiler, a wildlife researcher who was co-writer of the official entry on the khting vor for the ''Red List of Threatened Animals,'' published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

But that viewpoint was published three years ago. These days, Mr. Weiler is backpedaling furiously, apologizing for his rashness. In a fierce debate that has swirled through academic journals and acid e-mail exchanges, the naysayers seem to have triumphed.

The khting vor, they say, does not exist and never did exist. It is a legend, a chimera, the Loch Ness monster of Southeast Asia.

''This is the biggest hoax, if unintentional, in the annals of zoology,'' said Richard A. Melville, a retired trustee at Johns Hopkins University who has studied and written about the animals of Cambodia. ''There's no middle ground here. It's a hoax, my friend.''

Just to be sure there was no misunderstanding, Mr. Melville repeated himself with punctuation: ''This is the biggest hoax, parenthesis, if unintentional, end quote, in the annals of zoology. Period.''

But if there is no such thing as a khting vor, the last few believers timidly ask, what about all those horns, which certainly do exist?

Like creationists trying to explain away the evolutionary evidence of fossils, the khting vor skeptics are now hard at work discrediting the horns.

Sounding like a character from Seinfeld, they pronounce them: fake, fake, fake, fake.

It all started a decade ago when two German scientists, analyzing a set of horns, concluded that they belonged to a distinct species -- ''the last large mammal discovered in the 20th century,'' they said. They baptized it with a scientific name that rang with authenticity: Pseudonovibos spiralis.

But there were doubters almost from the start.

Arnoult Seveau, a ponytailed researcher at the Zoological Society of Paris, rented a motorbike and set off on what he said was a journey of thousands of miles around Cambodia, talking to villagers and examining sets of horns. He returned convinced that all were forgeries.

Together with two colleagues, he put half a dozen sets of horns to the test -- silicone rubber molds, microscopic analysis, close scrutiny of what seemed to be the marks of a knife or chisel.

Their conclusion: ordinary cow horns, cleverly twisted and styled through a complicated process of heating, scoring and polishing.

''Pseudonovibos spiralis is simply a forgery, their regularly ringed horns having been carved from domesticated cattle sheaths and then artificially deformed,'' they wrote in the journal of the French Academy of Sciences.

Mr. Seveau was emphatic. ''In the beginning I was looking for true animals,'' he said of his long journey through Cambodia. ''And what I found was a myth.''

But surely this conclusion only opens new mysteries. From the highlands of northeastern Cambodia to the Cardamom range in the far west, the scores of horns that have been found are practically identical. If the khting vor is a myth, it must have an origin and a meaning. There must be some source for the distinctive, flamboyant form of the horns.

One theory is that the the khting vor did once roam Cambodia's mountains but that it was hunted into extinction because its horns were prized as a cure for snakebite. Once the animal disappeared, the theory goes, clever artisans began manufacturing and selling forgeries.

''The folklore -- the beliefs of the Cambodian people -- is so widespread and consistent that it really makes you wonder what would be the source of this if it never existed,'' Mr. Weiler said. ''That's one reason I leaned toward the existence of the animal -- there are such a large number of these horns over such a wide geographical area bearing such a close resemblance to each other.''

For all the splash of their findings, the French scientists still have not proved a negative. There are said to be about 70 known sets of horns in Southeast Asia or in museums and laboratories abroad.

''All we need is one real set of horns, no matter how many fakes there are,'' Mr. Weiler said. That one set, ''my sword Excaliber'' as Mr. Weiler called it, was thought to be the horns stored in the University of Kansas Natural History Museum.

It was the solid pedigree of that set, as the trophy of American big game hunters in 1929, that made Mr. Weiler so confident three years ago that the khting vor had existed, at least in the past.

But that pedigree is now unraveling. The origin and history of the Kansas horns has become less clear. ''It's certainly not certain any more,'' Mr. Weiler conceded.

So now -- it's the 21st century, and the scientists turned to the final arbiter of modern forensics, DNA analysis. The chromosomes of the Kansas horns would present the final answer to the mystery of the khting vor.

As if snipping a thread from the Shroud of Turin, experts cut a tiny chip from the Kansas horns and put it to the test. They found what the French scientists had found, domestic cow.

But by now the debate had become personal and the scientific combatants were beyond surrender. With their backs to the wall, the advocates of the khting vor produced a final, seemingly unassailable ambiguity.

In rural Asia, they said, domestic cows often interbreed with their wild cousins of other species. The bovine DNA of the Kansas horns could prove nothing more than that they belonged to a khting vor with mixed blood.

So in the end, mystery has triumphed over science in the tale of the khting vor.

Whether or not it ever existed, whether or not any of those marvelous curling horns are real, it seems there will always be believers, not only among superstitious Cambodians but among the men and women of science who live in the barren world of fact.

Photo: A young girl, Mao Nin, holding a mounted set of horns people say belonged to an animal called khting vor. Scientists doubt it ever existed. (Seth Mydans/The New York Times) Map of Cambodia highlighting Phnom Penh.