Just over a decade ago, the saola made headlines round the world. Scientists discovered the animal in the remote Vietnamese highlands, the first large mammal to have been found anywhere in the world in more than half a century.
Since then, the creature, which looks like an antelope but is related to cattle, has been discovered in several areas across the country. In the late 1990s ecologists estimated about a thousand of these shy creatures, with their long pairs of distinctive black horns, were living in central Vietnam and Laos.
But Scientists working with WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) discovered last month that in less than 10 years saola numbers had crashed to around 200.
Even worse, population numbers are becoming so thin that prospects of them meeting and breeding are now slim.
The WWF team believes many saolas are being caught in snares for other creatures, such as bears, which are prized in the East for their gall bladders.
In addition, the saola is often hunted in its own right, so its distinctive head can be mounted as a trophy.
Scientists have been unable to breed saolas in captivity.
A group of scientists has therefore launched the ultimate high-tech bid to save the stricken creature: cloning. The project is the idea of scientists at the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology in Hanoi.
Led by Bui Xuan Nguyen, the team has already isolated saola DNA from tissue samples from creatures in the wild and, working with French scientists, have injected these into the eggs of cows, a goat and a swamp buffalo.
Early saola embryos were successfully created this way, but all died after a few days.
"We don't have any idea how to get past this stage," Nguyen admitted to Science.
The basic problem is a lack of knowledge about how saolas breed.
But Nguyen and other scientists remain confident they can clone the saola.
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