About the pangolin
- Also known as scaly anteaters
- Range in size from 12 to 39 inches in length
- They are covered in keratin scales, similar to human fingernails and toenails, the only known mammal with such scales
- Live in hollow trees and burrows
- Nocturnal
- Eat mostly ants and termites
- Often captured for use in traditional medicines, making them the most trafficked mammal in the world.
A University of Tennessee at Chattanooga professor is part of a research team that found a fossil for a new species of animal that lived about 2 million years ago.
Tim Gaudin, UC Foundation professor in the Department of Biology, Geology and Environmental Science, helped identify a species of pangolin—also called scaly armadillos—that lived in Romania in Eastern Europe. Discovery of the fossil—a humerus, or upper arm bone—is receiving international attention with the research published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
“Pangolins actually originate in Europe some 50 million years ago, but their fossil record ends there roughly 10 million years ago,” Gaudin said. “The new fossil shows that pangolins were present in Europe roughly 1 to 2 million years ago.”
The fossil confirms anthropologists’ belief that an extinct species of pangolin lived in Eastern Europe during that era, when most pangolins lived in sub-Saharan Africa, Gaudin explained.
He worked with a team from the University of Arkansas led by Associate Professor of Anthropology Claire Terhune.
The bone that was found is a humerus, or upper arm.
“It’s not a fancy fossil,” she wrote on the UA website. “It’s just a single bone, but it is a new species of a kind of a weird animal. We’re proud of it because the fossil record for pangolins is extremely sparse.”
Gaudin said the research team approached him due to his reputation in the anthropology world as a pangolin expert.
“I was brought in just two or three and a half years ago, once they figured out they might have a pangolin fossil since I am probably the world’s leading expert on fossil pangolins,” he said. “It sounds immodest, but to be fair, it’s a pretty small job. There aren’t a lot of fossil pangolins, much less people studying them.”
His jobs included identifying the fossil and helping determine its significance, he said.
The fossil was studied at the University of Arkansas but will be returned to Romania.
