From his first day in Vu Quang, a reserve that lies on the mountainous divide separating Vietnam from Laos, biologist John MacKinnon realized that he had entered an extraordinary, almost magical domain. Working out of a small army base that in earlier years had housed North Vietnamese troops, MacKinnon and a team of Vietnamese researchers set out in May 1992 on an expedition sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund. Their mission: to survey the animals in a mysterious area of moist, dense forest largely unexplored by scientists.
Returning from his first hike in the forest, MacKinnon encountered zoologist Do Tuoc, who had spent the day talking with hunters in the nearby village of Kim Quang about wild goats in the region. MacKinnon felt a flash of excitement when Do Tuoc mentioned coming across skulls with long, curved horns mounted proudly on posts in hunters' houses. "You'd better show me," said MacKinnon, for he knew of no goats of that description in Southeast Asia.
It took him just a moment with the skulls to realize that he was looking at an animal unknown to science. Subsequent analysis of the specimens' dna by Peter Arctander at the University of Copenhagen showed that the 220-lb. animal, variously called the Vu Quang ox, the pseudoryx and the Sao-la, was not just a new species but a new genus, probably separated from its closest cattle-like relatives for the past 5 million to 10 million years.
Finding an undiscovered genus of large land mammal was a stunning event in itself -- only three other new genuses have been documented in this century. But MacKinnon's beast was just the first of the wonders to emerge from Vu Quang and adjoining forests in Vietnam and Laos. In the past two years scientists have also found evidence of what appears to be two new species of deerlike creatures -- the giant muntjac and the quang khem -- and a novel species of fish resembling carp. Since exploration is still in its early stages, hopes are high that many more discoveries will follow. The area is "a biological gold mine," says MacKinnon, who has spent 25 years as a field biologist in Asia. Says Colin Groves, a taxonomist at Australia's National University: "The region represents much more than the find of the year; it could be the find of the century." A place long closed off from the world by tyranny and war has suddenly become an open classroom of natural history.