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Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
I'm Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent on Assignment in Tajikistan.
We've driven along dusty, rutted tracks into the mountains, surrounded by this hot, arid landscape.
BBC World Service, welcome to Assignment.
There's very few trees here.
There's a few pistachios, a few almonds, but otherwise it's these heavily grazed yellowing hills.
OK, this is the first place a hyena was captured.
Eight years ago, conservationist Ismail Kolmatov witnessed a near miracle when a striped hyena,
long assumed extinct in Tajikistan, showed up on one of his motion-sensitive wildlife cameras.
He says we were hopeless that we would find the hyena.
Academia, local people, they kept saying that hyenas are extinct.
So this discovery was a special moment.
While checking maybe 50 or 60,000 pictures,
there was it and nobody could believe their eyes and everybody cheered.
Wow.
So literally like looking for lost treasure.
Ismail's discovery raises the tantalizing prospect that one of Central Asia's rarest mammals,
one with a crucial role in the ecosystem, might yet be saved.
But here in the heat-hammered grasslands of southwestern Tajikistan,