Blink and you've missed it. Wait...there it i-....oh, nope. It's gone again.

The Saola is one of the world's rarest creatures, and was so (we think) even before humans hunted it and other factors contributed to its decline from an already small population. Another part of the reason for its rarity is that this creature makes itself very difficult to find...which in my mind makes it one of the smartest creatures in the world, in addition to one of the rarest. Any creature that deliberately hides itself away from humans has a crucial advantage.
But it may not be enough for the saola.
The saola is also colloquially known as the Asian Biocorn (or Asian Unicorn), or Spindlehorn, because of the long, straight horns it grows (sometimes reaching up to 50cm long in some cases (the picture I have below is of a younger saola.) The first photograph of a saola wasn't even taken until 1999! So up to that time, all we knew about them from hunters' trophies and researchers' stories and sketches.

The entire population of this rare, bovine creature lives in a fraction of the Annamite mountains, straddling Vietnam and Laos. Such a small habitat is already a major threat to its continued existence. The exact number of the current living population of saolas is unknown, but it is on the Critically Endangered Species list nonetheless. Their tiny habitat is and will continue to be threatened by human interests, and where it is not wholly destroyed, the habitat can be fragmented so that the breeding pools of saola will be isolated and this will result in a decline of healthy offspring. Additionally, the animal is hunted for the trophy of its horns. The saola feeds on leafy plants and undergrowth in the forests, but little more is known about its role in the ecosystem than this.

The saola doesn't have the extensive legal protections in place that other critically endangered or endangered animals do, like some tigers and bears, for instance.

It's hard to say what cascading effects the loss of the saola would be, since we know so little about it, and its very presence is so nearly invisible that the effects of its continued existence, even, are difficult to sketch out. If you want to help, below are a couple of links to organizations that are fighting to save this beautiful creature.

http:\\www.savethesaola.org

Save Our Species has a saola page: http://www.sospecies.org/sos_projects/mammals/saola/\

http://www.worldwildlife.org/species/saola


Ref: worldwildlife,org, wikipedia.org