Rhino!

Rhinos have it tough. Not only do poachers kill these animals for their horns and hide, but people have increasingly been moving in and converting the shy animals' forested habitat to villages.

On the island of Borneo, an estimated 25 to 50 members of the local subspecies remain. Few had been seen for years--until a motion-sensitive video camera attached to a tree there snapped a small movie of one of these animals.

"This astonishing footage captures one of the world's most elusive creatures," Carter Roberts said Monday, upon the video's release. Roberts is president of the World Wildlife Fund, the group that set up the camera and is now hosting the video on its website.

It's not the first time that such camera traps have confirmed an endangered rhino still exists, even if in perilously small numbers. In 1999, WWF photos of Vietnam's even more endangered rhino--a subspecies thought to number perhaps eight animals, served as the trigger for a Science News cover story on this critter--and efforts to save it.

The story grew from a series of phone interviews--including one to a conservationist in Ho Chi Minh City. He was on a rest-&-recuperation break from his work in the leech-and-tiger-infested national park where photos of the diminutive animal had been snapped.

In any case, take a lot at the Borneo video. It affords a rare glimpse of a majestic creature whose population teeters on the brink of extinction.