Pangolin
Pangolins are the only mammals covered from head to tail in hard, overlapping scales made of keratin, the same protein found in human fingernails. There are eight species in the family Manidae: four in Asia (the Indian, Chinese, Sunda and Philippine pangolins) and four in Africa (Temminck's ground, giant, white bellied and black bellied pangolins); the photos on this page show Temminck's ground pangolin of the African savanna. All of them feed almost entirely on ants and termites, which they dig out with strong curved claws and catch with a long, sticky tongue that can reach about 40 centimeters in the largest species. They have no teeth at all, so prey is ground up in a muscular stomach. Most are shy, solitary and active at night. When threatened, a pangolin curls into a tight ball that even lions struggle to open, but that same armor makes it easy for people to pick up and carry away. Hunted for their scales and meat, pangolins are considered the most trafficked wild mammals in the world, and all eight species are threatened, from Vulnerable to Critically Endangered.
What is a pangolin?
A pangolin is a small to medium sized mammal covered in large, overlapping scales, which makes it look a bit like a walking pine cone or an artichoke with legs. It is the only mammal in the world with a full coat of scales. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein as human hair and nails, and they can make up around a fifth of the animal's weight. The name comes from the Malay word pengguling, which means something that rolls up, a reference to the way pangolins curl into a ball when they feel threatened. Pangolins have no teeth, a long sticky tongue and powerful claws, and they live almost entirely on ants and termites, so many people think they are a kind of anteater or armadillo. They are not. Pangolins belong to their own order, Pholidota, with a single living family, Manidae, and genetic studies show that their closest living relatives are the carnivores, the group that includes cats, dogs and bears. Their resemblance to anteaters is a case of convergent evolution: unrelated animals that ended up looking alike because they eat the same food. Today there are eight pangolin species, four in Asia and four in Africa.
Types of pangolins: the eight species
Four pangolin species live in Asia. The Indian pangolin, the largest Asian species, lives in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal and is Endangered. The Chinese pangolin lives in the hill forests of southern China, northeastern India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and northern Indochina and is Critically Endangered. The Sunda or Malayan pangolin lives from Myanmar and Thailand through Indochina to Malaysia and Indonesia and is also Critically Endangered, as is the Philippine pangolin, found only on Palawan and a few nearby islands. Four species live in Africa. Temminck's ground pangolin, the one in the photos on this page, lives in the savannas and woodlands of eastern and southern Africa and is Vulnerable. The giant pangolin, the largest of all, lives in the forests of central and western Africa and is Endangered. The white bellied or tree pangolin is a small climber of the same forests and is also Endangered, while the black bellied or long tailed pangolin, the smallest species, spends most of its life in the trees and is Vulnerable. Its tail, with around 47 vertebrae, is one of the longest relative to body size of any mammal. All Asian species belong to the genus Manis; the African ones are split between Smutsia for the two ground species and Phataginus for the two tree species.
How big is a pangolin?
Pangolins vary a lot in size. The smallest, the black bellied pangolin of African forests, weighs only about 1.5 to 3 kilograms (3 to 7 pounds), and most of its length is tail. The largest, the giant pangolin, can measure up to about 1.8 meters (6 feet) from nose to tail tip and weigh more than 30 kilograms (66 pounds). Temminck's ground pangolin, the species in the photos, usually weighs 5 to 15 kilograms (11 to 33 pounds) and measures around 70 centimeters to 1.4 meters including the tail, which is about as long as a medium sized dog. Asian pangolins fall in between: the Indian pangolin can reach about 1.2 meters including the tail, while the Chinese pangolin weighs only 2 to 7 kilograms. All pangolins share the same basic design. Their bodies are long and low, with a small pointed head, tiny eyes and, in most species, small or no outer ears. Hard, sharp edged scales cover the back, sides, legs and tail, and only the face, belly and inner legs are bare or hairy. Asian pangolins have a few hairs growing between their scales, while African pangolins do not. Their front feet carry long curved claws for digging, so long that ground pangolins often walk on their back legs to keep them from wearing down.
Where do pangolins live?
Pangolins live in the tropical and subtropical parts of Asia and Africa. In Asia they range from Pakistan and Sri Lanka across India, Nepal and Bangladesh to southern China, and south through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippine island of Palawan. The Indian pangolin tolerates dry scrub, grassland and farm edges, the Chinese pangolin prefers hill forests up to around 3,000 meters in Nepal, and the Sunda pangolin lives in rainforest, secondary forest and even plantations and gardens. In Africa, pangolins range from Senegal across the forests of central Africa and through the savannas of the east and south down to South Africa. The forest species, the giant, white bellied and black bellied pangolins, live in the rainforests of western and central Africa, while Temminck's ground pangolin, the species in the photos, is the only pangolin of the dry savannas, from South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya through Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Botswana to the northern half of South Africa. On this map, Asian countries show the four Asian species together, while African countries show the range of Temminck's ground pangolin. All pangolins need places with plenty of ants and termites and soil or hollow trees where they can shelter during the day.
What do pangolins eat?
Ants and termites make up almost the entire diet of every pangolin species, along with their eggs and larvae. A pangolin finds a nest mainly by smell, then tears it open with its strong, curved front claws. Ground pangolins dig into termite mounds and ant nests in the soil, while tree pangolins raid nests in branches and rotting wood. Once a nest is open, the pangolin pushes its long, thin tongue deep into the tunnels. The tongue is coated in sticky saliva and in the giant pangolin can reach about 40 centimeters (16 inches), longer than the animal's head and body would suggest, because it is anchored deep inside the chest rather than in the mouth. When not in use it rests in a pouch in the throat. Pangolins have no teeth at all, so they swallow insects whole. A muscular part of the stomach lined with hard spines, helped by small stones and sand the pangolin swallows, grinds the food up. Pangolins can close their nostrils and ears and have thick eyelids to keep biting ants out while they feed. Many are picky eaters that focus on just a few kinds of ants or termites, which is one reason they are so hard to keep in captivity. A single pangolin eats huge numbers of insects every year, which helps control termites and keeps the soil healthy.
How do pangolins defend themselves? The pangolin ball
A pangolin's main defense is its armor. When a predator such as a lion, leopard, hyena or tiger gets too close, the pangolin tucks its head against its belly and rolls into a tight ball, wrapping its scaly tail over its face. In this position no soft skin is exposed, and the sharp edges of the scales can cut a paw or a mouth that tries to force them apart. Ground pangolins can also move the scales on their tail like a saw against anything that pushes into the ball. Lions in African parks have been filmed spending long minutes batting and biting a rolled up pangolin without managing to open it, and sometimes simply give up and walk away. Pangolins can also hiss and puff, and they can release a foul smelling liquid from glands near the tail, a little like a skunk. Tree pangolins use their long tails to hang on and escape through the branches, and many pangolins run to a burrow if they have time. This defense works well against natural predators, but it is useless against people. A curled pangolin cannot run, so a poacher only has to pick it up and put it in a bag. That is one of the reasons why pangolins have been taken from the wild in such huge numbers.
How do pangolins live?
Pangolins are shy, solitary animals that are rarely seen even by people who live near them. Most species are active at night and spend the day asleep in a burrow, a hollow tree or a tangle of roots. Temminck's ground pangolin often rests in burrows dug by aardvarks or springhares, and in the cold of the southern African winter it may come out in the afternoon instead of at night. Asian ground pangolins dig their own burrows, which can be several meters long. Each pangolin has a home range that it marks with scent from glands near the tail, with urine and with droppings, and males usually range over larger areas than females. Their eyesight is poor, but their sense of smell is excellent, and they follow scent trails across the ground with their nose close to the soil. Ground pangolins move in a curious way, often walking on their back legs with the body tilted forward and the tail held out behind for balance, keeping their long front claws off the ground. Tree pangolins climb with ease, gripping bark with their claws and wrapping their prehensile tails around branches. Pangolins can also swim. Little is known about how long they live in the wild, but pangolins in captivity have lived about 20 years.
Baby pangolins
Pangolins breed slowly, which makes them especially vulnerable to hunting. Females usually give birth to a single young, called a pup, once a year; Asian species sometimes have two or, rarely, three. Pregnancy lasts around four to five months in Temminck's ground pangolin and in the Sunda pangolin, and can be longer in the Chinese pangolin. In Temminck's pangolin most pups are born in the southern winter, between May and July. A newborn pangolin is small, with soft, pale scales that harden within a few days. For the first weeks the pup stays in the burrow while the mother goes out to feed, nursing on milk from a pair of teats on her chest. When it is a few weeks old it starts traveling with her, riding on the base of her tail, and if danger appears the mother curls up around it so that the pup is protected inside the ball of scales. The young pangolin begins eating ants and termites while still riding along, and it becomes independent at around three to five months in most species, although it may share its mother's range for a while longer. Because each female raises so few young, a population that loses many adults to poaching can take a very long time to recover.
Why are pangolins the most trafficked mammals?
Pangolins are widely considered the most trafficked wild mammals on Earth. They are hunted for two things: their scales, which are dried, roasted or ground into powder for use in traditional medicine even though keratin has no proven medical effect, and their meat, which is eaten as a luxury food in parts of Asia and as bushmeat in Africa. Conservation groups estimated that more than a million pangolins were taken from the wild between 2000 and 2013, and a report published in late 2025 counted more than 530,000 pangolins involved in about 2,200 seizures between 2016 and 2024, with scales making up 99 percent of the confiscated parts. As Asian pangolins became scarce, the trade turned to Africa. Huge shipments of African scales have been seized on their way to Asia, including more than 25 tonnes in a single week in Singapore in April 2019, and Nigeria has become a major export hub, where customs and the Wildlife Justice Commission have seized more than 25 tonnes since 2021. Pangolins are also killed by electric fences in southern Africa, caught in snares set for other animals and squeezed by the loss of forests and savanna to farms, roads and mines. Their slow breeding means that populations hit by the trade recover only very slowly.
Are pangolins endangered?
Yes. All eight pangolin species are threatened with extinction according to the IUCN Red List, whose most recent assessments date from 2019 and 2020. Three Asian species, the Chinese, Sunda and Philippine pangolins, are Critically Endangered, the highest category before extinction in the wild. The Indian pangolin, the giant pangolin and the white bellied pangolin are Endangered, and Temminck's ground pangolin and the black bellied pangolin are Vulnerable. No one knows how many pangolins are left, because they are shy, nocturnal and very hard to count, but every species is thought to be declining. In 2016, governments voted to move all eight species to Appendix I of CITES, the highest level of protection, which has banned international commercial trade since January 2017. In 2020 China raised the Chinese pangolin to its highest level of national protection and removed pangolin scales from its official list of traditional medicines. Rescue centers now take in pangolins seized from traffickers, care for them and return them to the wild, from Save Vietnam's Wildlife in Cuc Phuong National Park to the Tikki Hywood Foundation in Zimbabwe and the African Pangolin Working Group in South Africa. Every year, World Pangolin Day, on the third Saturday of February, draws attention to these animals and the trade that threatens them.
