Largest Mammal Discovery Of 20th Century A Fake[Original headline: Science declares rare species a bum steer]
An elusive and incredibly rare species of wild steer native to the mist-shrouded highlands of Cambodia and Vietnam is likely to be taken off the list of endangered fauna - never to return.
The reason: the creature never existed at all.
Like the Piltdown Man and other genuses that never were, Pseudonovibos spiralis should have a classification in the encyclopaedia of scientific hoaxes, according to French research.
The ruminant was first "identified" by two German zoologists who found a pair of lyre-shaped, twisted horns with markings unlike those of any other animal.
The horns, spotted in markets in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Lat, appeared to be that of a medium-sized member of the bovid family. Two sets of similar horns were collected in Cambodia, near the border with Vietnam.
Locals called the creature "linh duong", Vietnamese for mountain goat, or "khting vor" in Khmer, which means "wild cow with horns like lianas".
They told how the shadowy animal still survived in the mountainous central districts of Vietnam and in north-eastern Cambodia.
Similar types of horns found in the region in the 1920s were believed at the time to be those of an immature female kouprey, a kind of ox. But on the basis of the new material, the Germans concluded that the horns were quite different and belonged to a completely "new and previously unknown bovid". They named the animal Pseudonovibos spiralis after its spindle-shaped horns.
The creature, "the last large mammal discovered in the 20th century", entered the fast-growing bestiary of species threatened by man. As no photo existed, artists sketched their idea of a medium-sized buffalo with twisted horns.
On the red list of the International Conservation Union, a database of imperilled wildlife revised and published just two months ago after four years' work, P. spiralis is categorised as a species with "a very high risk of extinction in the wild" with a population of fewer than 2500 mature adults.
But the linh duong never trod this or any other planet, say naturalist Arnoult Seveau of the Zoological Society of Paris, Herbert Thomas, a palaeontologist and bovid specialist at the College de France, and biochemist Alexandre Hassanin of the Paris-VI University.
Mr Seveau travelled extensively in Cambodia in 1999 in search of the animal. He never saw one, but came across two sets of horns and skull attachments in local markets, "as well as lots of eyewitness accounts about the creature".
On his return home, Mr Seveau had a stroke of luck, finding four similar sets of horns brought back to France by a French settler in Indochina in the 1920s.
He and the other scientists made a silicon-rubber mould of the inside of the horns to show every indentation and scrutinised microscopically the outside of the horn.
Their conclusion: the horns came from vulgar cattle.
The horn sheath, made of a tough but pliable nail-like substance called keratin, had been heated and then twisted into the distinctive lyre shape using a pair of pliers. The outside layers of keratin had been cleverly trimmed with a knife to provide the horn's rings.
"Pseudonovibos spiralis is simply a forgery," the trio conclude in an article to be published next month.
Far Shores thanks to Joe Gagne for supplying news source
• Story originally published by •
AFP via The Age / Australia - December 18 2000
