The East African Pangolin is a thing of rare beauty

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Pangolins are like no other animal on earth. Unlike fish or snake scales, a pangolin's scales are made out of keratin, the same stuff in our fingernails and they don't resemble anything else. People usually describe how a pangolin will roll up into a ball when it feels threatened and yes it happens a lot but it's also funny how something so foreign seems so natural when you see it actually happen.

https://youtube.com/shorts/-B7ZpCwGn34?si=GrvBJV9m2BDNXSsR

Lions can give up on trying to catch a pangolin because once it rolls into a ball, it's impossible to get it back out, it's like trying to catch a football that's covered in scales.

Pangolins feed on ants using tongues that are longer than their bodies, it's strange that evolution has given such a disproportionate amount of tongue to a creature that eats such tiny things. It also seems unlikely that a single pangolin could eat up thousands of ants, but perhaps ants regenerate their colonies much faster than we realise.

The major threat to the pangolin today is poaching, not habitat destruction or climate change. The scales are sold on the black market as medicine which don't work and the meat is sold in markets. There are no medicinal properties of keratin, it's no different from the keratin in your hair, but the demand for it continues to grow and the population of pangolins continues to decrease at a greater rate than they can reproduce.

It's sad that the vulnerable status of pangolins is rarely spoken of and enforcement of poaching laws is so weak in many parts of Africa, not just Africa.

Pangolins have an awkward way of moving because their front claws are very large and that's good for digging and their legs look like an afterthought. Unfortunately, evolution does not always create animals with gracefulness.