Keratin armour made them the world’s most trafficked mammals
Pangolins are toothless, scale-covered mammals that live on ants and termites, rolling into a tight armoured ball when threatened. That defence fails against people: an estimated 100,000 a year are smuggled to China and Vietnam, making them the most trafficked mammals in the world.
The living family, Manidae, has five Asian species in the genus Manis and two each in the African genera Phataginus and Smutsia, ranging from about 30 centimetres to a metre long. A possible ninth species, reported in 2023, is known only from seized scales. Their overlapping plates, soft and white at birth before darkening within days, are made of keratin, the same stuff as fingernails, and make the animal look like a walking pine cone. The order’s Greek name means clad in scales, and pangolin comes from a Malay word for one who rolls up.
Everything about the body serves insect eating. With poor eyesight and no teeth, pangolins find prey by smell and hearing, rip open mounds with powerful front claws and probe the tunnels with a sticky tongue that, in large species, reaches 40 centimetres yet is only half a centimetre thick. Its root lies in the chest rather than the throat. Swallowed stones and keratin spines in the stomach grind up the meal, and one animal may eat 140 to 200 grams of insects a day, often sticking to one or two kinds. Tree pangolins hang by prehensile tails, while ground species dig burrows up to 3.5 metres deep.
They live alone, meeting only to mate; males can be 40 per cent heavier and may club rivals with their tails. After a pregnancy of roughly 70 to 140 days, African mothers usually bear one young and Asian mothers up to three, raising them for about two years. Despite looking like armadillos, pangolins are closest to the carnivorans, from which they split around 75 million years ago.
Demand for scales in traditional medicine and meat as a delicacy has driven over a million animals into illegal trade in a decade. All species are listed as threatened, three critically, and international commercial trade is banned under CITES Appendix I; in Nigeria, research published in 2025 identified hunting for meat as the main cause of decline.
Source: Pangolin
