John Frederick Walker

Ashley Stimpson’s recent, riveting reporting in Atlas Obscura focuses on biologist Pedro Vaz Pinto, who spearheaded efforts to save Angola’s walking emblem, the giant sable antelope. Against all odds, the 2009 expedition he headed to find and capture some to create a captive breeding herd, succeeded.

“Though Vaz Pinto has enjoyed many magical moments over the course of his 20-year mission to save the charismatic ungulate, the creature’s future remains fraught,” Stimpson writes. There are only about a hundred of them in Cangandala National Park, perhaps only 300 total in Angola, which is struggling economically, and poaching is on the rise as people struggle to survive.