According to National Geographic, biologist Nick Pilford captured the female leopard on a camera trap set up in the Liosaba Conservancy, Kenya, after he received a tip-off that a "panther" had been spotted there numerous times.
And the trap paid off as he managed to snap a photo of the rarest of the big cats.
"Almost everyone has a story about seeing one, it's such a mythical thing," Pilfold said.
"Even when you talk to the older guys that were guides in Kenya many years ago, back when hunting was legal [in the 50s and 60s], there was a known thing that you didn't hunt black leopards. If you saw them, you didn't take it."
The rare cat, gets its colouration from melanism - an excess development of dark pigmentations.
According to National Geographic, this the first time a black leopard has been spotted in Africa for more than 100 years. The last sighting of a wild black leopard in Africa was in Ethiopia in 1909.