Pangolin

🤯 Fun Facts

• Walking PineconesPangolins are the only mammals covered in scales! When threatened, they roll into a tight ball, making them look like living pinecones.
• Armored SquirrelsPangolins are the only mammals covered in scales, making them look like real-life armadillos! When threatened, they can curl up into a tight ball, using these scales as armor against predators.
• A Tongue Longer Than Its BodyPangolins have no teeth at all. Instead they rely on a sticky tongue that can stretch longer than their own head and body combined, anchored all the way back near their pelvis, to slurp up ants and termites by the thousands.
• The Stomach That ChewsPangolins have no teeth, so the stomach does the chewing instead. Its far end is thick and muscular, lined with hard keratin spines pointing inward, and it usually holds small stones the pangolin has swallowed. Together they grind whole insects apart much the way a bird's gizzard does.
• 70 Million Insects a YearOne adult pangolin can eat more than 70 million insects in a single year, almost all of them ants and termites. All that digging turns over organic matter and aerates the soil, and the burrows they abandon get taken over by other animals looking for shelter.
• Armor Written Into the GenomeWhen researchers sequenced pangolin genomes in 2016, they found broken copies of tooth-building genes still sitting in the DNA but no longer read. They also found that a gene tied to the skin's ability to fight disease has stopped working, which hints that pangolins came to lean on their scales for protection instead.
• Scales With a Return AddressAsian and African pangolins have been on separate evolutionary paths for at least 23 million years. A Smithsonian-led team used that deep split to build a genetic family tree covering all eight species, giving investigators markers that can trace a seized scale back to the species it came from.
• Fingernails, BasicallyPangolin scales are keratin, the same protein your fingernails and hair are made of. That has done nothing to slow demand: when the IUCN reviewed seizures logged between 2016 and 2024, scales made up 99 percent of every confiscated pangolin part.