Saola- The Asian Unicorn Caught on Camera [Video]

Saola or the Asian Unicorn, a rare and highly endangered mammal was recently caught on camera in Vietnam, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) announced Thursday. This is the first time that the mammal has been spotted in over 15 years.

The image was taken by a camera trap set at in the Central Annamite mountains by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Vietnamese government's Forest Protection Department.

"When our team first looked at the photos we couldn't believe our eyes. Saola (pronounced as sow-la) are the holy grail for South-east Asian conservationists so there was a lot of excitement," said Dr. Van Ngoc Thinh, WWF-Vietnam's Country Director. "This is a breath-taking discovery and renews hope for the recovery of the species."

The elusive mammal has two parallel horns with sharp ends, which in some cases are as long as 50 inches. Saola is a distant relative of a wild cow, although it looks like a deer. WWF said last year that the animal could go extinct within the next few years due to loss of habitat in Vietnam and Laos.

Camera traps help conservationists get a glimpse of rare animals in their natural habitat. Recently, researchers at Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Imperial College London obtained a photo of a Bornean bay cat (Pardofelis badia) - a rare, spotted cat living in the rainforests of Borneo.

The photos caught by these camera traps show that the threatened animals might be more resilient to forest degradation than previously assumed.

"In Vietnam, the last sighting of a saola in the wild was in 1998," said Dang Dinh Nguyen, Director of Quang Nam's Saola Nature Reserve, according to a news release. "This is an historic moment in Vietnam's efforts to protect our extraordinary biodiversity, and provides powerful evidence of the effectiveness of conservation efforts in critical saola habitat."

The saola, Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, was discovered by researchers from Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and WWF in 1992. The team was surveying the forests of Vu Quang, near Vietnam's border when they found bones and unusual skulls from a hunter's home.