The Palawan Pangolin

February 14, 2019

You ever get those moments when you wish you could just roll into ball and close off from the entire world, shielding yourself from all the bull-tae? Well the Palawan Pangolin can do that.

Also known as the scaly anteater, the Palawan Pangolin is one of 8 species of Pangolin in the world. It uses it’s scaly “armor” as a defense against predators, and has a super long tongue that it uses to eat ants and termites. For World Pangolin Day (today, every third Saturday of February), I decided to make some infographics highlighting the most trafficked mammal in the world.

For more trivia, check out the infographics below!

Pangolin is from Malay penggulung. In Filipino is Balintong.

One of the most interesting things about the Palawan Pangolin is a lot about Palawan. Unlike other islands in the Philippines, Palawan is the only island that was ever connected to an Asian landmass. All the other Philippine islands stayed more or less isolated throughout the past 20 million years give or take.

Palawan’s connection to the Asia was through a land bridge that connected it with the island of Borneo, which is shared by the countries of Indonesia and Malaysia today. This land bridge was formed due to lower sea levels at the time, around less than a million years ago (I know right, my mind KENNAT EVEN).

Here’s a snippet of a study that proposes the theory that it was through this exact land bridge that the Palawan Pangolin’s ancestors rolled into Palawan.

Isolation through sea level rising (approximately 800,000–500,000 years ago) of proto-Palawan pangolins coming from Borneo through Early Pleistocene land bridges might have promoted the speciation of M. culionensis, a Palawan endemic species to be considered of high conservation concern.