June 25 - A New Species??? Captured!!!

Posted on June 25, 2021

Key points

This is an update of my post published on June 25, 2010:

It is very rare that a new mammal of a medium-to-large size is discovered. The Okapi was discovered by Europeans for the first time in 1910…

Okapi

…But since then there had been no additional discoveries of large-scale mammals until skulls with unusual horns turned up in Vietnam in 1992.

The previously unknown creature was called (variously) the Vu Quang ox, spindlehorn, Asian unicorn, siola, or (most commonly) saola. The Hmong people call it saht-supahp, “the polite animal.” It is a sort of antelope.

The search for live specimens of saola took two years. On this date in 1994, the London Times announced that a live specimen had finally been captured.

Since then, a “camera trap” finally captured a photo of a living saola in the wild (in 1999), and conservationists in Vietnam have started working hard to protect this critically endangered species.

When I first wrote about the saola, in 2010, scientists only knew of 11 individuals alive in captivity or the wild. Now scientists know of about 750 living in the wild (and of course a few more living in captivity).