Saola

MammalSoutheast Asia
Written By Alexander Julius Jensen

Pseudoryx nghetinhensis

The saola — often called the "Asian unicorn" — is endemic to the Annamite Mountains of Laos and Vietnam. Discovered by science in 1992, it has never been directly observed alive by researchers in the wild and may number fewer than 100 individuals.

Ancient Unicorns

Our earliest records of unicorns come from Asia. The Shijing, an ancient anthology of Chinese poems written between the 11th and 7th century BCE, contains the oldest surviving piece of writing to mention a unicorn, although this was hardly a unicorn as most would know it today. Rather, it was a Qilin, a mythical creature with the body of a deer, a horse's hooves, an ox's tail, fish scales, and a dragon's head. It is, however, often depicted with a singular horn atop its head, a uni-horn.¹

Not long after this anthology was compiled in China, a 4th-century historian and doctor in Ancient Greece named Ctesias wrote a book called Indika ('On India'), a compilation of travellers' tales from the titular land. Within it, he described a type of wild ass that is “fleet of foot, having a horn a cubit and a half in length" — a single horn.

An Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) and Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) on the left and artwork of unicorns from 1794 on the right.

We get another description of a unicorn from 1st century CE Rome. Pliny the Elder — whose track record with zoological accuracy is admittedly spotty — wrote about the monokeros ('single horn'), a very different kind of unicorn with the feet of an elephant and one black horn. More than 100 years later, in a book of his travels across Asia, Marco Polo wrote about unicorns that "They delight in living in mire and in mud," and that "It is a hideous beast to look at, and in no way like what we think and say in our countries."

While the mythical Qilin, with its many chimeric features, eludes comparison to real-world animals,* the other unicorns are more explicable. Pliny’s and Polo’s unicorns are likely one and the same: the Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), the great one-horned creature that roams across the northern grasslands of the Indian Subcontinent, stomping around on its great elephantine feet and wallowing in mud. Ctesias' unicorn — described as being "coloured white, red and black" — is likely an Arabian oryx. When this desert antelope turns its head to profile, its long, symmetrical horns align, appearing as a single slender horn protruding from its head.

Today, rhinos and oryxes hardly constitute mythological beings. They are beautiful and awe-inspiring, for sure; that's why they feature as the subjects of documentaries and the logos of airlines. They're charismatic and, consequently, well-studied animals — which is hardly a bad thing — but as a result, they've lost that air of mystery that once surrounded them, that made them unicorns. So, did we lose our unicorns to the cold, hard facts of science and our modern world's instant information network? Not quite. Strange creatures still hide in unexplored corners. The oldest unicorns come from Asia, and there they still hide today.

The Annamites

If you were after a modern-day unicorn, the Annamites — over 1,000 kilometres (>620 mi) of mountains running along the border of Laos and Vietnam — would be the place to look. The tropical forests that cover these slopes may be the closest thing we have left to a place from a fantasy tale.

Here live some of the most cryptic creatures on the planet.

A pair of Annamite striped rabbits (Nesolagus timminsi).

A Laotian rock rat (Laonastes aenigmamus).

An Owston's palm civet (Chrotogale owstoni).

Reptilian mammals, toothless and plated in keratinous dragon armour, trudge along the forest floor; gentle souls taking refuge from hunters who wish to steal their scales. Alongside live some of the rarest rabbits in the world, their copper-coloured fur decorated with complex patterns of black stripes. The karst limestone cliffs are alive with rock rats; grey-furred critters that look like an enigmatic mix of traits from rats, mice, squirrels and chinchillas. Skinny civets with weasel-like bodies slink along the ground, slurping up earthworms with slender snouts. Giant barking deer with whirling, two-pronged horns sneak through the undergrowth. Herds of grey tusked giants push through the trees, while feathered fire-sprites — ashen bodied and golden winged — flit about in the low branches. And, clambering through the canopies above, are monkeys with red leggings and white sleeves, their gentle faces like the sunrise hitting a snowy mountain.

A giant, or large-antlered, muntjac (Muntiacus vuquangensis).

A golden-winged laughingthrush (Trochalopteron ngoclinhense).

A red-shanked douc langur (Pygathrix nemaeus).

It's a fauna out of some Wonderland.²

These are no fairy tale woods, however, with wide stands of pine trees and pleasant meadows, but a claustrophobic tangle of vines and branches, with constricting walls of vegetation; a dim world enclosed beneath a thick canopy, with blankets of mist rolling overhead like giant, amorphous creatures, turning the air wet and sticky, calling the many biting insects to feast. This may be one of the largest contiguous forests in continental Southeast Asia, but from the inside, it feels like a choking, living labyrinth made to drive a person insane. In these maddening woods — among the graceful monkeys, rock rats, and rare striped rabbits — is where you'll find your unicorn.

The Asian Unicorn

The Asian unicorn was unknown to the world until 1992.

In a remote village in Vietnam, in the house of a local hunter, researchers came across a strange skull with two black horns, each 50 centimetres (20 in) long, arching from its crown and gently curving backwards. No animal in the Annamites, or anywhere in Southeast Asia for that matter, was known to have horns like these — the nearest candidate, the Arabian oryx, lived on the other side of the continent.

Supposedly the first photo ever captured of a saola, by a camera trap in Vietnam in 1998.

This new species — called the saola by locals — was the first large mammal discovery in more than 50 years.³ Even though it wasn't exactly a unicorn (given its double horns), this was perhaps the most spectacular zoological discovery of the entire 20th century, and researchers were keen to find the living creature. But, as with historic hunts for the unicorn, this new ungulate proved frustratingly elusive. Unlike the unicorn, however, the saola also eventually proved to be real. In 1998, six years after the skull was discovered, the first ever photo of a wild saola was snapped by a remote camera trap in Vietnam. It showed a hoofed creature, covered in short, dark-brown fur, and white markings along its face, including two lines atop its eyes that looked like angry eyebrows. Its horns were cut off by the top of the frame.

The species has been gradually described from more remains — bones and skins — a handful of short-lived individuals in captivity, and more camera trap images. They paint a picture of a large animal, some 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) long and weighing between 80 and 100 kilograms (175–220 lb), its dark-brown body covered in white stripes and bands. The saola's tapering black horns, like those of the oryx, seem to become one when its head is turned to the side.

Researchers have known of the saola's existence for over 30 years now, but they've yet to observe it in the wild directly. What little we know of its behaviour comes from the few captive individuals and some environmental clues. The saola seems to be most active in the early morning and evening, and it likely leads a solitary life, snapping twigs with its horns and leaving behind scent markings from massive glands on its face to communicate with others of its kind. Captive saola were also heard bleating, although we don't know why — they might simply have been distressed. The saola's mating habits, development, lifespan? All, as of yet, unknown.

So, what exactly is this Asian unicorn?

The saola does look superficially like an oryx, with its long tapering horns — in fact, its genus name is Pseudoryx ('pseudo-oryx') — but it's not an oryx, nor does it seem to be very closely related; the saolas closest living relatives are actually wild cattle like water buffalo, gaur, and bison. That being said, it's also the sole species in its genus. There's nothing else alive today like the saola. This singular bovine is one of the rarest animals currently in existence, considered 'critically endangered' with a population in the hundreds or possibly even the dozens.

To Save the Saola

In stories, hunters sought the unicorn for its horn, which purportedly could detect and counteract poisons, with kings supposedly making vessels from unicorn horns to prevent a fatal sip of wine. The biggest threat to the saola is hunting; it's not lured and tamed by a virgin in the woods, but caught in wire snare traps. And the saola isn't even the target. So rare was this unicorn that no one ever sought its horns — it was unknown to most Asian cultures, such as ancient China, and so its parts never came to be used in their traditional medicines.

The Annamite's endemic deer and civets, meanwhile, are hunted, cut up, and sold on the illegal wildlife market — their parts used in traditional medicines that are about as effective as non-existent unicorn horns. The saola is an incidental victim of indiscriminate cruelty; the kind of cruelty that leaves behind emaciated corpses, bony legs still trapped by the wire that killed them. Areas with the most traps suffer from "empty forest syndrome". The fantastical forest becomes a green graveyard of ensnared corpses.

This isn't subsistence hunting by local people, this is poaching for profit. To the locals, the saola isn't an important source of meat, nor is it considered a crop pest. The relationship between the humans of the Annamites and their ghostly neighbours is one of pride. One can imagine the pride a person could feel if they're taught from childhood about the magical creatures that live all around them and nowhere else in the world. That kind of pride, cultivated with knowledge, could instil a lifelong commitment to not just their homes, but the beings they share them with.

The best way to conserve an endangered animal is to involve, not shut out, the local people who live alongside it. The Saola Working Group (SWG), a network of experts and conservation partners — including IUCN Lao and WWF Vietnam⁴ — works to create patrol teams from local villagers who know their areas best.Working in five key saola habitats, these teams have, since 2011, removed more than 130,000 wire snare traps. Of course, if they're allowed to stay, poachers will counteract these efforts by setting more wire traps. In the same timespan, and in just a single area, forest guards have destroyed more than 600 illegal hunters’ camps.⁵

In the past, captive saola have not fared well, probably due to inadequate conditions (see this video of a saola in captivity) and a lack of knowledge required to ensure their welfare. Currently, some of the utmost authorities on conservation are working together to set up a Saola conservation breeding programme. Located in Bach Ma National Park, Vietnam, the centre will not only be the first ex-situ breeding site for the many endemic and endangered Annamitic species — giant muntjacs, Annamite striped rabbits, Vietnamese crested arguses, and big-headed turtle — but, if worse comes to worst, it will serve as a last bastion for the saola should the wild population disappear. This kind of breeding programme has been critical in bolstering wild populations of other endangered ungulates, including other "unicorns" like the Arabian oryx.

The last visual record we have of the saola is a camera trap photo taken in 2013. While camera traps continue to watch for another sighting, conservationists get their hands dirty analysing dung and finding other creative ways to track down the elusive animal, such as checking the blood consumed by leeches for saola DNA. Local people still report spotting the saola from time to time, keeping hope for the species alive. And, according to conservationists working to save the saola, there is still hope, as long as we act quickly.

Today, the unicorns of myth — the chimeric qilins from China and the pure white mares of Europe — only exist in our imaginations and stories. In their stead, we have desert unicorns in the form of oryxes and hulking, mud-loving unicorns in the form of rhinos. We nearly wiped them out, too. The saola is a real creature — it lives, breathes, and wanders the Annamites — but it's on the path to becoming just another sad story of what we've lost. There were once unicorns in our woods. There were once saola in the Annamites. In a modern world stripped of its literal magic, let's, at least, not lose our unicorns.

¹ A The Qilin, as it's depicted with its hooves and fish scales, doesn't match any real-world species. However, in 1414, a live giraffe was gifted to the Ming emperor Yongle as the mythical Qilin. The emperor, although likely unfamiliar with giraffes, remarked that the creature was certainly no Qilin.

The Qilin also features in Japanese mythology, although there it's known as the Kirin — a name that, in Japanese, it shares with the giraffe.

² An inventory of Annamite animals in order of their descriptions:

³ Most of the new species we discover are small (insects, crustaceans, worms, frogs and little lizards). We've long since discovered many of the large creatures that we share the planet with. Only in the most remote places do we still find new ones. One such place is the Annamites, with many of its "large" creatures only recently being described. The saola was described in 1993, the giant muntjac in 1994, the Annamite striped rabbit in 2000, and the Laotian rock rat in 2005.

⁴ The full list of partners includes WWF-Viet Nam, ReWild, Wroclaw Zoo, Asian Turtle Programme and Bach Ma National Park.

⁵ The 600 illegal hunting camps were removed from a 200,000 hectare (494,200 ac) area in the Central Annamites designated for the Carbon & Biodiversity (CarBi) Programme — "Aimed at halting deforestation, through forest protection and sustainable use of forest resources, and preserving the unique species diversity". You can read more about it here.

Where Does It Live?

⛰️ Moist, evergreen and mixed deciduous forests.

📍 The Annamite Mountains on the border of Laos and Vietnam.

‘Critically Endangered’ as of 27 Nov, 2015.

IUCN

  • Size // Large

    Length // 1.5 metres (4.9 ft)

    Weight // 80–100 kg (175–220 lb)

  • Activity: Diurnal/Nocturnal ☀️/🌙

    Lifestyle: Solitary (sometimes small groups) 👤

    Lifespan: 5 – 11 years

    Diet: Herbivore

    Favourite Food: Leaves 🍃

  • Class: Mammalia

    Order: Artiodactyla

    Family: Bovidae

    Genus: Pseudoryx

    Species: P. nghetinhensis

  • Many animals have been called "unicorns," from Indian rhinos to Arabian oryxes and the giraffe-like okapi of Africa. But truly, the rarest of unicorns live in Asia.

    The saola was unknown to the world until 1992.

    Researchers in the Annamite Mountains came across a strange skull in a local hunter's hut — a skull with long, curving black horns that matched no known species from the region.

    This new species was the first large mammal discovery in more than 50 years.

    In 1998, six years after the skull was discovered, the first-ever photo of a wild saola was snapped by a remote camera trap in Vietnam.

    The saola is a large animal, some 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) long and weighing between 80 and 100 kg (175–220 lb), its dark-brown body marked with white stripes and bands. From its head grow two 50 cm (20 in) long horns which, when viewed from the side, align to look like a single uni-horn.

    The saola's closest living relatives are wild cattle like water buffalo, gaur, and bison. But it's also the sole species in its genus — there's nothing else alive today like the saola.

    The saola has been so elusive that it's never become a target in the wild-animal-parts trade or black market. It is, however, inadvertently caught in illegal traps meant for rare, endemic civets and deer.

    Researchers have known of the saola's existence for over 30 years now, but they've yet to observe it in the wild directly and the last visual record we have of the saola is a camera trap photo taken in 2013. The species is 'critically endangered'.

Alexander Julius Jensen
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