12 Astonishing Facts About the Pangolin, the World's Only Scaly Mammal

The pangolin looks like an animal a child invented: a walking pine cone with claws, a tongue longer than its own body, and not a single tooth in its head. Yet every detail is real, and most of them are adaptations to a single obsessive habit — eating ants and termites. Here are 12 facts that capture how genuinely odd, and how quietly endangered, this creature is.

12 facts about the pangolin

1. It is the only mammal covered in scales. Those overlapping plates are made of keratin, the same protein as your fingernails and hair, and they can account for around a fifth of the animal's body weight.
2. There are eight species. Four live in Asia (genus Manis) and four in Africa (Smutsia and Phataginus), ranging from roughly 1.6 kg to about 33 kg.
3. Pangolins have no teeth. They swallow small stones and keratin spines that sit in a muscular stomach and grind up insects — a built-in food processor.
4. The tongue is anchored near the pelvis. Rather than rooting in the mouth, it attaches deep in the chest near the last pair of ribs, and in large species it can be longer than the body.
5. They eat enormous numbers of insects. A single pangolin can consume on the order of 200,000 ants and termites in a day.
6. They curl into a ball. The name comes from the Malay penggulung, meaning "one that rolls up" — armour that defeats leopards but, tragically, not human hands.
7. A baby is a pangopup. Females usually bear a single pup, which rides on the base of the mother's tail for months.
8. They are their own genetic branch. Pangolins are the only living members of the order Pholidota; despite the resemblance, they are not closely related to anteaters or armadillos.
9. Some climb, some dig. Africa's tree pangolins use a prehensile tail to climb, while ground species are powerful burrowers.
10. They are mostly nocturnal and solitary. This, plus dense habitat, is why no one has a reliable global population count.
11. They are the most trafficked wild mammals on Earth. An estimated one million or more were taken from the wild over a recent decade.
12. Every species is declining. The Chinese and Sunda pangolins are now Critically Endangered.

For the full conservation picture, taxonomy and species table, see our pangolin species guide. WARN's partner-funded teams focus on protecting wild pangolins at source, because no program has yet bred and released them at meaningful scale.