The saola, one of the rarest mammals on the planet, has been caught on camera in Vietnam for the first time in 15 years, spurring hope that it might be possible to save the animal from extinction, the WWF said. The animal is a cousin of cattle, and it’s made distinct by its two parallel horns with sharp ends that can grow as long as 1½ feet. The saola was not found until 1992, when a joint team from Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and WWF surveyed Vu Quang, the forested, species-rich region near the Vietnam-Laos border. When the saola was discovered in 1992, it was the first large mammal new to science in more than 50 years, according to the WWF. The animal, dubbed the “Asian Unicorn” because it is so rarely seen, was photographed in Vietnam’s Central Annamite mountains. “When our team first looked at the photos we couldn’t believe our eyes,” Dr. Van Ngoc Thinh, the World Wildlife Fund director in Vietnam, said in a statement announcing the photos. “Saola are the holy grail for South-east Asian conservationists so there was a lot of excitement.” 
 
 The last reported saola sighting was in 1999 in Laos, and the last time one was spotted in Vietnam was in 1998, the WWF said. Even 20 years after its discovery, little is known about the saola’s ecology or behavior because the animal is so elusive.
– One conservationist went so far is to call them "the most important wild animal photographs taken in Asia, and perhaps the world, in at least the past decade." That's because, captured in them, is an image of the "Asian Unicorn." That's the nickname given to the elusive saola, an endangered animal that wasn't discovered until 1992 and is so rarely seen that the last on-record appearance in Vietnam was in 1998, reports the Los Angeles Times. (Villagers in Laos managed to trap one, which died days later, in 2010.) This time, a camera trap set up by a World Wildlife Fund team snapped the creature in September in Vietnam’s Central Annamite mountains. With only a few hundred of them (at most) thought to be in the forests that sit along the Vietnam-Laos border, the team's director calls the saola "the holy grail for South-east Asian conservationists." What's more, notes the Christian Science Monitor, the sighting could be a good omen for conservation efforts in Vietnam, which is home to five of the world's most endangered species—including the saola. The creature's nickname is a bit of a misnomer, though; the AFP points out that the antelope-like creature (actually a cousin of the cow) has two horns, not one, which have sharp ends and can grow to 20 inches in length.