50 Fun Facts About Pangolins

Pangolin scales are made of which substance, the same one that forms human fingernails?

Keratin makes up every scale, and together the plates account for about a fifth of a pangolin's body weight. Reptile scales, by contrast, are built quite differently.

The word pangolin comes from pengguling, a term in the Malay language carrying which meaning?

One who rolls up is the sense of pengguling, built on the Malay verb guling. The name was first given to the Sunda pangolin, which Malay speakers today call tenggiling.

Despite resembling armadillos, pangolins have which animals as their closest living relatives?

Cats, dogs and bears belong to the carnivorans, which share a branch of the mammal family tree named Ferae with pangolins. The two lines are thought to have split about 75 million years ago.

Which unwanted title do conservationists give pangolins among the world's wild animals?

Most trafficked mammal is the label conservationists give pangolins, which by one estimate account for as much as 20% of all illegal wildlife trade.

What do pangolins swallow to help grind up insects in a muscular stomach that works like a bird's gizzard?

Small stones collect in the stomach and mash each meal as its muscular walls churn. The stomach lining adds horny spines of its own to help with the grinding.

Which Ground-type Pokémon, number 27 in the original Pokédex, is widely thought to be modelled on a pangolin?

Sandshrew borrows the pangolin's best-known defence as well as its looks. In the Alola region the same creature turns up in an Ice and Steel-type form.

Pangolins are among the few mammals that completely lack which body feature?

Teeth are missing from a pangolin's jaws, so it swallows its prey whole. Pangolins were once placed with sloths and armadillos in an order called Edentata, meaning toothless.

Pangolins can drive off attackers by releasing a noxious chemical from glands near the tail, like which other mammal?

Skunk-like scent glands give a pangolin a back-up defence, and the young use it too: giant pangolin infants spew a yellow secretion said to reek of decay and cabbage.

How does the ground pangolin of southern Africa usually walk, with its heavy tail held out for balance?

On its hind legs is how a ground pangolin covers most distances, with its front limbs and their long digging claws held clear of the soil.

Early in 2020, researchers briefly suspected pangolins of passing the virus behind which disease from bats to humans?

COVID-19 was linked to pangolins after one stretch of a viral gene proved a 99% match, but comparing whole genomes showed only about 92% similarity, too little to blame them.

Which Hong Kong action star fronted the 2017 WildAid public service announcement nicknamed Kung Fu Pangolin?

Jackie Chan made the advert for the charity WildAid, one of several campaigns in China that have used celebrities to turn the public against buying pangolin products.

Which British broadcaster named the Sunda pangolin among ten species he would most like to save from extinction?

David Attenborough chose it for an episode of the BBC's Natural World, recalling how he once rescued a pangolin from being eaten while filming early in his career.

Pangolin: Kulu's Journey was directed by Pippa Ehrlich, who won an Academy Award for which earlier nature documentary?

My Octopus Teacher made her name; the 2025 film follows Gareth Thomas, an investment manager with no wildlife training, as he prepares a rescued baby pangolin for a return to the wild.

Which 2016 Disney film directed by Jon Favreau includes an Indian pangolin among the neighbours of a honey-loving bear?

The Jungle Book makes its pangolin one of Baloo's neighbours, alongside a pygmy hog voiced by Favreau himself and a giant squirrel voiced by fellow director Sam Raimi.

Which body part of the giant pangolin can stretch up to 70 centimetres to reach termites inside their mounds?

Tongue length is a pangolin speciality: the organ is anchored deep inside the body rather than in the throat, and sticky saliva on it picks up the insects.

With very poor eyesight, pangolins depend mainly on which sense to track down ant nests and termite mounds?

Smell guides a foraging pangolin to its prey. Most species feed at night, when a keen nose is worth far more than sharp eyes.

Which unexpected skill do pangolins have, with one African species gulping air into its stomach to help?

Swimming comes easily to pangolins, and the long-tailed pangolin sometimes drops from an overhanging branch straight into a stream, crossing it with a quick undulating motion.

Which term describes the tail of a tree pangolin, strong enough to grip a branch and hold its whole weight?

Prehensile tails let tree pangolins hang from a branch while they strip away the bark to expose the insect nests inside.

How do the scales of a newborn pangolin differ from those of an adult in its first hours of life?

Soft and pale at birth, the scales harden and darken after several days. Until then the mother stays in the burrow and wraps her body around the baby when she senses danger.

The overlapping brown scales of a pangolin give it an appearance often compared to which woodland object?

A pine cone is the usual comparison, though the long-tailed pangolin's scales have also been likened to the leaves of an artichoke.

Apart from humans, the ground pangolin's main predators are leopards and which other African carnivores?

Hyenas and leopards head the list of its natural enemies. A cornered ground pangolin hisses, puffs and lashes out with a tail whose sharp-edged plates can cut.

Pangolins and armadillos gained similar protective plating without being close relatives, an example of which process?

Convergent evolution means the two reached the same design independently. The look-alikes were once even classified together in a single order of mammals.

Pangolins are often known by which other name, even though they are not related to the animals it mentions?

Scaly anteaters is the common nickname, earned by the diet and the long snout. The animals it borrows from live in the Americas and are grouped with sloths instead.

Which Swedish naturalist gave the Chinese pangolin its scientific name, Manis pentadactyla, in 1758?

Carl Linnaeus proposed the name, which still stands. The animal he described lives from Nepal across to southern China and has been recorded 3,000 metres up.

For which holiday in 2017 did Google release a four-day Doodle game starring a pangolin collecting objects?

Valentine's Day brought a game in four levels, one released each day from February 11, in which the pangolin gathers objects and dodges obstacles.

The ground pangolin often sleeps in burrows abandoned by warthogs or by which other African digging mammal?

Aardvarks leave holes that suit a pangolin well, though it can dig its own: its burrows have rounded chambers large enough for a person to crawl inside and stand up.

The long-tailed pangolin of the African rainforest canopy differs from every other pangolin by being active when?

During the day is when the long-tailed pangolin forages, possibly to avoid competing with its close relative the tree pangolin, which feeds in the same forests after dark.

Which gift made from gilded pangolin scales did the future Edward VII receive on his 1875–76 tour of India?

A coat of armour, with a matching helmet, was presented by the Maharaja of Datia. An older pangolin-scale coat, given to George III in 1820, is on show at the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

Which Linux operating system gave the code name Precise Pangolin to its long-term support release of April 2012?

Ubuntu pairs an adjective with an animal sharing its first letter for every release, and version 12.04 honoured the pangolin. It was the system's fourth long-term support release.

The Philippine pangolin is found in the wild only in which island province, once joined to Borneo by a land bridge?

Palawan is its only home, where locals call it balintong. Rising seas are thought to have cut the island off early in the Pleistocene, leaving its pangolins to become a separate species.

Eomanis, the earliest known true pangolin, comes from the Messel Pit, a famous fossil site in which country?

Germany's Messel Pit preserved Eomanis so well that its last meals survive, showing it ate plants as well as insects. Its limbs and tail, unlike a modern pangolin's, carried no scales.

A species known only from scales seized by customs, never seen alive, was named in 2023 as which kind of pangolin?

Cryptic pangolin is the common name of Manis mysteria, identified from the DNA of scales seized in Hong Kong and Yunnan. Nobody yet knows where in Asia the animal lives.

At a 2016 wildlife trade conference in which South African city did 182 countries ban commerce in all pangolins?

Johannesburg hosted the vote, which was unanimous. It moved every pangolin species onto the strictest list of an international treaty that had regulated their trade since 1975.

When an Indian pangolin raids an ant or termite colony, which stage of the insects' life cycle does it prefer?

Eggs come first when an Indian pangolin breaks into a colony, though it eats larvae and adults too. It digs in with the three centre claws of each forefoot, kicking the soil backwards.

Seizure data suggest which country overtook China in 2018 as the main destination for smuggled pangolin scales?

Vietnam prizes pangolin meat as a luxury dish and uses the scales in folk remedies. A year later it also reported the largest seizures of scales, ahead of Nigeria.

The Chinese, Sunda and Philippine pangolins all sit in which category of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species?

Critically Endangered is the last step before extinction in the wild. The Chinese pangolin has held the rating since 2014, after numbers fell by more than 80% in three generations.

In which Southeast Asian country are road accidents and habitat loss, not hunting, the main dangers to Sunda pangolins?

Singapore keeps a mapped database of pangolin sightings, rescues and roadkills, and has a national action plan to protect the animals that survive in its forests.

Traditional Chinese medicine uses roasted pangolin scales in the unproven belief that they help new mothers do what?

Produce breast milk is a claim first written down in a Chinese text of 752 CE, and no evidence supports it. Scales are also wrongly credited with clearing blood clots.

Which African country burned three tonnes of seized pangolin scales in 2017, the day before World Pangolin Day?

Cameroon's bonfire destroyed scales from up to 10,000 animals, and it was only part of the story: the country had impounded more than eight tonnes since 2013.

The tree pangolin's species name, tricuspis, describes which feature found on each of its brownish scales?

Three points on every scale give this African forest pangolin its Latin label. It is the species most often seen in bushmeat markets on the continent.

Pangolins are the only living members of which mammal order, named from the Greek for clad in scales?

Pholidota contains just one living family, the Manidae, divided into three genera: Manis, Phataginus and Smutsia.

Ground pangolins on the African savanna have a curious habit of wallowing in which substance?

Herbivore dung is the ground pangolin's covering of choice. Odour matters to the species in other ways too: it marks its territory with urine, secretions and scattered droppings.

In January 2022, rebels in which African country held a pangolin hostage and demanded a ransom from conservationists?

DR Congo was the setting for the stand-off, which conservationists feared could start a new trend in wildlife crime: seizing rare animals to hold for ransom.

Which American modernist poet published a 1936 collection titled The Pangolin and Other Verse?

Marianne Moore later won the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems, and in 1955 Ford asked her to suggest names for the car that became the Edsel.

Patriomanis, the only fossil pangolin known from the Western Hemisphere, was unearthed mostly in which US state?

Wyoming's White River Formation yielded most of the six known specimens. Patriomanis, whose name means father of pangolins, had long fingers and a gripping tail suited to life in trees.

A giant pangolin was sighted in 2023 in Niokolo-Koba National Park, a first there since 1999, in which country?

Senegal had written the species off as locally extinct before the sighting. The giant pangolin is the largest of its kind, with males reaching up to 1.8 metres long.

Bones of an extinct giant pangolin, up to 2.5 metres long, were first described in 1926 from which Indonesian island?

Java gave the species its name, Manis palaeojavanica. More of its bones turned up in Malaysia's Niah Caves and were carbon-dated to between 42,000 and 47,000 years old.

Which scientific term describes a diet of ants and termites, the specialist feeding habit of every pangolin?

Myrmecophagy comes with strict tastes: pangolins often eat only one or two insect species even when many are on offer, and can get through up to 200 grams of them in a day.

In parts of India and Nepal, wearing the scales of a pangolin is believed to ward off which illness?

Pneumonia is the feared illness there, while in Southeast Asia scales are made into rings as charms against rheumatic fever. No such use has any proven effect.

The ground pangolin is also named after the zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck, who came from which country?

Netherlands-born Temminck inherited a large collection of bird specimens from his father, treasurer of the Dutch East India Company, and went on to direct a museum.