Endangered? It didn't even exist Animal with spindle-shaped horns is just a domesticated cow and its classification is the result of a great hoax, French researchers say PARIS - 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 world's list of endangered fauna - for good. The reason: The creature never existed. In fact, the very classification of Pseudonovibos spiralis was the result of a great hoax, according to French research. The ruminant was first 'identified' by two German zoologists who came across a pair of lyre-shaped, twisted horns with unique markings. The horns, spotted in markets in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Lat, appeared to belong to 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 horns were found in the region in the 1920s, and 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 decided that the horns belonged to a 'new and previously unknown bovid'. They named the animal Pseudonovibos spiralis for its spindle-shaped horns. The Red List of the International Conservation Union, an imperilled wildlife database, said the animal had 'a very high risk of extinction in the wild'. But the linh duong never existed, say naturalist Arnoult Seveau of the Zoological Society of Paris, palaeontologist Herbert Thomas of the College de France, and biochemist Alexandre Hassanin of the Paris-VI University. Mr Seveau travelled extensively in Cambodia last year in search of the animal. He never saw one, but did come across two sets of horns and skull attachments in local markets. On his return, he found 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 hollow horns to show every indention, and scrutinised the outside under the microscope. They deduced the horns came from vulgar cattle. The horn sheath, which is made of a tough but pliable nail-like substance called keratin, had been heated up, possibly with a red-hot stick, then twisted into the distinctive lyre shape using a pair of pliers. Close scrutiny of the outside layers of keratin showed that they had been cleverly trimmed with a knife to create rings. 'Pseudonovibos spiralis is simply a forgery, their regularly ringed horns having been carved from domesticated cattle sheaths and then artificially deformed,' the trio concluded in an article to be published next month. 'These modified horns were then fitted to any domesticated cow frontlet or even sometimes to their original frontlet.' They suggest the 'steer' was a cash cow for local traders who sold the horns as having miraculous cures against snake bites. --AFP