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THE HEROES of myth slew monsters. These days, just find- ing one would earn the searcher Herculean acclaim. Thus, some men, freed of the obligation to pose nude while holding Medusa's head, spend years tracking Bigfoot, Yeti, and, in the case of Robert Rines, dead at 87, the Loch Ness Monster.

Mr. Rines in 1972 first glimpsed what he took for that great beast--"Nessie," to locals--on a lakeside Scottish honeymoon when his host spotted what he first thought was a capsized boat. "What they saw," says The New York Times, "was a big, grayish hump with the texture of an elephant's skin [that] rose four feet out of the water and seemed about 30 feet long." In a reversal of normal fishing rules, the water thing hooked the human: Mr. Rines would spend decades trying to prove it real.

Mr. Rines, who had an M.I.T. science degree, conducted the pursuit innovatively, dumping behemoth-beguiling perfume and strapping cameras on trained dolphins. Later in the '70s, he captured his quarry, underwater, on film--or did he? The images were murky, short of scientific standards.

Not so, many of Mr. Rines' other feats. Omnicurious, he was omniaccomplished. In a single lifetime, he patented 800 inventions, wrote show tunes, started a law school, found the sunken Bismarck, pioneered ultrasound cataract therapy, co-wrote patent laws for Taiwan and China, improved Patriot missiles . There isn't room for all of it.

No one has seen a sign of Nessie for a generation. Mr. Rines theorized that the lonely leviathan, a refugee from prehistory, died, the last of its kind. In our era of ultra-specialization, of big-toe surgeons who don't fix little toes and scholars devoted to red-headed Elizabethan poets who yodeled, let us honor the monstrously talented Robert Rines, who may be the last of his.