But trying to find the little fellow has been like playing a game of whack-a-mole in nature’s arcade.

“It’s very difficult to understand them because they spend most of their lives underground,” Theron told The Washington Post. “They have superb abdominal muscles and they’ve got very strong pedal-like arms to move through the sand. They rely entirely on hearing for hunting so they must have superb sensory hearing.”

A paper chronicling the search for the De Winton’s golden mole was published Nov. 24 in the scientific journal Biodiversity and Conservation.

To find the mysterious mammal, Theron’s team from the Endangered Wildlife Trust and the University of Pretoria used a revolutionary technology called eDNA, meaning the environmental DNA that animals shed in their ecosystems.

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Theron’s team collected sand samples along the beaches and dunes on the northwest coast of South Africa — the only place De Winton’s golden mole had been seen previously — and then the crew sifted through those samples in a lab to isolate the eDNA.

To differentiate De Winton’s golden mole from other mole species, the team used a DNA sample that had been maintained by a South African museum for decades.

When the team compared their eDNA sequences to the sample, it was a clear match to the De Winton’s golden mole, their study reported.

“This struck me as something that could change the game,” Theron said. “If the technique could find the De Winton’s golden mole, we could use it for any of the golden moles.”

The team has since trapped at least one De Winton’s golden mole and photographed it. Theron wants to use the eDNA technique to continue mapping out the critter’s habitat and ensure their conservation in the face of ongoing residential developments and mining.

“We need to secure the habitat. That’s an absolute priority,” Theron said. “The study and understanding comes later.”

The three-year effort by Theron’s team to find the De Winton’s golden mole “is a story of hope,” Theron added. “It shows that there’s opportunity still — even in this day and age — to discover new things, learn more and conserve more.”

And it comes just weeks after scientists announced that they had documented the existence of another mammal thought to have disappeared, Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, during an expedition to Indonesia’s Papua province. A group of Oxford University scientists recorded images of the egg-laying mammal — which had been spotted only once, in 1961 — with remote trail cameras they set up this summer in the inhospitable Cyclops Mountains.

“Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna has the spines of a hedgehog, the snout of an anteater, and the feet of a mole,” James Kempton, the Oxford biologist who led the expedition, said in a statement. “Because of its hybrid appearance, it shares its name with a creature of Greek mythology that is half human, half serpent.”