Species Saola

Saola

The saola, Vu Quang ox or Asian unicorn, also, infrequently, Vu Quang bovid (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis), is one of the world's rarest mammals, a forest-dwelling bovine found only in the Annamite Range of Vietnam and Laos. Cousin to cattle, goats, and antelopes,

The team found three skulls with unusual, long, straight horns kept in hunters' houses. In their article, the team proposed "a three month survey to observe the living animal", but more than 20 years later, still no sighting of a saola in the wild had been reported by a scientist. However, a living saola was photographed in the wild in September 2013 by a camera trap set by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Vietnamese government’s Forest Protection Department. Van Ngoc Thinh, the WWF's Vietnam country director, said, "This is a breathtaking discovery and renews hope for the recovery of the species."

The saola inhabits the Annamite Range's moist forests and the eastern Indochina dry and monsoon forests. They have been spotted in steep river valleys at about 300 to 1800 m above sea level. These regions are distant from human settlements, and covered primarily in evergreen or mixed evergreen and deciduous woodlands. The species seems to prefer edge zones of the forests.

An adult saola stands at about 80–90 cm at the shoulder, with its entire body length measuring around 150 cm (the tail measures additionally out to about 25 cm) and weighs 90–100 kg. Its hair is straight, short, and surprisingly soft for an animal partly adapted to a montane habitat, and is usually of a medium chocolate brown color (though some have been noted to contain variations of a reddish tone). However, this is not uniform, with both the neck and belly a slightly paler shade, as well as various white markings scattered across its body, such as white patches on the feet, vertical stripes across the cheeks, and splotches on the nose and chin.