Today there is nowhere on this planet that can fairly be described as pristine. Little wildlife now survives; human beings and our livestock make up 96 per cent of all mammals by mass. All other animals, from aardvarks to zorillas, squeeze into the remaining 4 per cent. Six out of every ten birds are domestic poultry. Human beings sequester between 25 and 40 per cent of the photosynthetic output of all the earth’s plant life. Indeed, the human domination of the earth now exceeds, by several measures, our planet’s capacity to sustain it. It’s therefore a surprise when, now and then, an entirely new creature turns up. And not merely some microbe – there are lots of these – but something big enough to do you damage were it to tread on your foot. 

Such was the case when a paper reached the journal Nature from a remote area of Vietnam reporting the discovery of the skin, skull and horns of a kind of large antelope hitherto unrecorded in European science. The biggest surprise is that the paper was written not in 1892 but in 1992. One would have thought that by then scientists had shaken every tree and turned over every stone in search of undiscovered wildlife. Eventually, film of this shy nocturnal creature, known as the saola or Vu Quang ox, turned up, showing it to be very much alive. This was an animal that went out of its way to keep out of the way. Even the locals living in and near the saola’s woodland home didn’t see it very often. But they had seen it before Western scientists, and that is key. 

Floe Foxon is a student of crypto­zoology, the study of animals known only to science through folktales and legends. Cryptozoology has had a bad rep, and deservedly so, thanks to its propagation of unsubstantiated stories about the existence of Bigfoot, the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster. Such stories,