Vietnamese jungles yield `lost world' of the rarest animals

IN THE century's most astonishing series of wildlife discoveries, Vietnam is yielding up its hidden animals.

A country closed to scientific examination by nearly four decades of savage warfare involving the Japanese, the French and then the Americans has, during the 1990s, produced at least six large mammals previously unknown to science - a rhinoceros, at least four species of deer and antelope, and a particular type of primate. And some scientists consider these finds represent only the beginning.

The discoveries, from jungles that even in peacetime are immensely remote and impenetrable, have come thick and fast since Vietnam began to open itself to the outside world at the end of the 1980s.

Most spectacular has been that of the Vietnamese subspecies of the Javan rhino, which is one of the world's most endangered animals. Its existence has been known since 1989 from skins and tracks, but it had never been seen in the wild by scientists or photographed until this year, when a remakable picture was taken by an automatic camera in the Cat Tien national park in Vietnam's southern central highlands [right]. Tracks had revealed that a family of perhaps seven rhinos - the only ones known - were at large in the park, and automatic cameras were set up to photograph them, triggered when the animals broke a laser beam.

Perhaps even more significant to scientists, however, are the completely unknown types of animal that have emerged. The first was the pseudoryx, a long-horned jungle beast that may be related to the ox, the goat or the antelope, which was discovered in 1992. It is sometimes called the spindelhorn, and sometimes by its Vietnamese name, sao la.

Its discovery in the Vu Quang nature reserve marked the first appearance of a new large animal since the kouprey, a jungle ox which is also a native of Vietnam, was discovered in 1937.

In 1993 a deer, the giant muntjac, was also discovered in Vu Quang, and since then two other members of the muntjac family, the Truong Son muntjac (1997) and the leaf muntjac (1998), have also appeared.

More mysterious has been an antelope given the scientific name Pseudonovibos spiralis, which has been known since 1994 from its horns, which turn up in markets, but has not yet been seen by scientists as a whole animal, alive or dead.

Also in 1994, Douglas Richardson, curator of mammals at London Zoo, discovered a separate type of loris - a sort of nocturnal monkey - in a cage in Hanoi market. It was several times as big as the well-known guinea pig-sized slow loris, and has been tentatively named the giant loris, although this beast too has yet to be seen in the wild.

"The finds in Vietnam have been absolutely the most exciting period of animal discovery of the century," Mr Richardson said yesterday. "We are continually finding new smaller animals: perhaps 20 tropical frogs are discovered a year, and if you go out and spend a whole day in the rainforest the chances are you'll discover a new beetle.

"But it is the discovery of such large new animals that is so exciting. When the okapi was discovered in 1901, people thought, `That's it: there won't be any more large animals to be found.' And we've had this run of surprises," he added.