Half-deer, half-mouse creature resurfaces in Vietnam after nearly 30 years

Tiny creatures that look half deer, half mouse have reappeared after nearly three decades of being thought lost in southern Vietnam, a discovery that has thrilled biologists around the world.

The silver-backed chevrotain, also known as the Vietnamese mouse-deer, was last recorded more than 25 years ago, when a team of Vietnamese and Russian researchers obtained a dead specimen from a hunter.

"For so long, this species has seemed to exist only in our imagination," said An Nguyễn, a Vietnamese biologist and associate conservation scientist with Global Wildlife Conservation.

The silver-backed chevrotain, also known as the mouse-deer.

"Discovering it is just the first step in making sure we don't lose it again, and we're moving quickly to figure out how best to protect it," An said in a statement.

Scientists had feared that the chevrotain, which was on Global Wildlife Conservation's (GWC) list of the 25 most-wanted lost species, had fallen victim to habitat loss and hunting. In Vietnam, the chevrotain is a protected species, and hunting, trading or consuming protected wildlife is illegal.

Details of the discovery were published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

After interviewing villagers and forest rangers near the seaside city of Nha Trang (Khánh Hòa province, south-central Vietnam), the team set camera traps for five months in areas where locals said they might have seen the chevrotain.

The effort yielded 275 photos of the diminutive mouse-deer. The team then set up 29 more cameras in the same area, this time capturing 1,881 images of the chevrotain over five months.

According to GWC, the chevrotain is the smallest hoofed animal in its family. It is shy and solitary, tends to walk on the tips of its hooves and has two small fangs. It typically weighs less than 4 kg.

The animal was first described by scientists in 1910, when four specimens were collected around Nha Trang. There were no further scientifically verified records of the chevrotain until 1990, when one was confiscated from a local hunter in central Vietnam.

The chevrotain is the smallest hoofed animal in its family; it is shy and solitary.

"So little was known about this species that the search was a huge question mark. One of the biggest challenges was deciding where to start looking," said Andrew Tilker of GWC.

"We had two potential sites quite far apart, one in the south and one much farther north. But we knew that many people had put cameras in the wet forests of the north without results, so we thought we should look for habitat in the dry forests, where not many people knew about the species," Tilker said.

According to Tilker, the new discovery has major implications for efforts to find species thought to be rare and lost in the wild.

"To science, this was a lost species, but local people all knew about it. It was only by using local ecological knowledge that we succeeded. That approach can be replicated for other species in other parts of the world," he said.

Tilker also cautioned that just because the species was found relatively easily, that does not mean it is not threatened.

"The chevrotains we found may be the last individuals, or one of only a few remaining, in which case we need to act immediately to put conservation measures in place to ensure their survival," Tilker said.

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Related topics:

silver-backed chevrotain

Vietnamese mouse-deer

lost species rediscovered

camera traps

Global Wildlife Conservation

Andrew Tilker