In the final hours of a month long search through rugged jungles swarming with mosquitos, scientists confirmed the sighting of a bird that hasn’t been seen in 140 years.

A picture of the ground-dwelling black-naped pheasant-pigeon was captured via camera trap, and felt to the team “like finding a unicorn.”

Documented to science in 1882 and not seen since, the black-naped pheasant pigeon is now almost certainly the most endangered bird in New Guinea, and reinforces the need to conserve as much of its home of Fergusson Island off the east coast of the mainland.

With just hours remaining before their search was called off, expedition co-leader Jordan Boersma was catching his breath on a hillside while looking through camera trap photos.

“Suddenly I was confronted with this image of what at that time felt like a mythical creature,” Boersma, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, told the Audubon Society. “It was, without exaggeration, the most surreal moment of my life.”

Funding the expedition is The Search for Lost Birds, an initiative to locate 150 avian species lost to science but not declared extinct, organized by BirdLife International, Re:wild, and American Bird Conservancy.

This is normally when a reporter explains a little about the “mythical creature” but so little is known about it beyond its chicken size, and that it carries a plethora of rust-colored back and shoulder feathers which sharply contrast its black nape and tail.