White-bellied pangolin

Appearance

Each dark brown to brownish yellow scale has three points, to that the specific name tricuspis refers. (The Greek meaning of White-bellied pangolin is "number by order"),These scales cover the whole body besides the face, underbelly, and insides of the legs. The scales are made of keratin, as are human fingernails, and are anchored at the base to the pangolin's skin. The head is small, and the snout is elongated.

The combined head and body length is 33–43 cm (13–17 in). The tail is 49–62 cm (19–24 in).

Range and habitat

The white-bellied pangolin ranges from Guinea through Sierra Leone and much of West Africa to Central Africa as far east as extreme southwestern Kenya and northwestern Tanzania. It has been found on the Atlantic island of Bioko, but no records confirm a presence in Senegal, Gambia, or Guinea-Bissau. It is found in lowland tropical moist forests (both primary and secondary), as well as savanna/forest mosaics.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Habits

It can climb up trees in the absence of branches. It has a well-developed sense of smell, but as a nocturnal animal, it has poor eyesight.

Female pangolin territories are solitary and small, less than 10 acres (4 ha), and they rarely overlap.

In crisis

White-bellied pangolin is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on White-bellied pangolin, Wikidata item Q28173138. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.