14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, the World Wildlife Fund announced that camera traps set up in an unprotected area in Vietnam had snapped a picture of a very rare animal commonly referred to as the Asian unicorn.
The species, whose official name is saola (or Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, if you prefer) was discovered back in 1992. It looks much like an antelope, and sports two long horns on its head.
Since then, it was just once photographed in the wild in 1999. Some time later, in 1996 and 2010, two live specimens were studied after villagers in Laos caught them in local forests, Mongabay reports.
Wildlife researchers determined that the species inhabited the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam and said that, judging by how rarely it was seen in the wild, it was likely that it was an endangered one.
Thus, it was said that just a few dozen such animals were still alive in the wild, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature argued that, “Saola numbers may be so low that no viable populations remain.”
Now that one such bovine has been photographed in its natural habitat for the first time in over a decade, conservationists argue that the species might still have a chance of survival.
“This is an historic moment in Vietnam’s efforts to protect our extraordinary biodiversity, and provides powerful evidence of the effectiveness of conservation efforts in critical saola habitat,” says conservationist Dang Dinh Nguyen.