Meet The Endangered: Saola
Saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis)
The Saola (‘saw-la’) has one of the most unusual conservation histories of any large animal. Confined to the mountain highlands straddling Laos and Vietnam, it was first discovered by Western scientists in 1992.
DNA testing on trophy skulls has placed the Saola firmly in the Bovini tribe, meaning it is more closely related to buffalo, cattle and bison than to the deer or antelope species it superficially resembles. The fortunes of this tribe have been highly divergent. While the Saola is perhaps the single rarest mammal in the world, its cattle cousins (Bos taurus) now number nearly 1 billion.
Unusually among large animals, the Saola is rarely targeted by commercial poachers. The species is so rare as to have been unknown in antiquity, and thus it does not appear in traditional Asian medicine. It is hunted by local trophy hunters, and is sometimes ensnared in traps meant for other animals.
The largest threat to its survival, however, is habitat fragmentation. It prefers steep, high-elevation river valleys with intact old-growth forest, but the areas that connect these valleys are being logged and converted to agriculture.
The last Saola sighting occurred in 2013, when a motion-activated camera caught a glimpse of a single individual. The most optimistic projections put the Saola population at under 100. But most researchers suspect this noble species is already extinct, having appeared and then disappeared in the span of a single human lifetime.
IUCN: Critically Endangered (EN)