2023-10-02 10:14:34
Updated Monday, October 2, 2023 – 10:14
This is the ninth species of this highly vulnerable mammal.
Archive image of a pangolon.EFEAsia 700 euros: what a kilo of pangolon scales costs, the most trafficked mammal in the world Environment Traditional medicine and the black market, two serious threats to endangered species like the pangolon
Chinese scientists announced the discovery of a new species of pangolon in China, based on genomic data extracted from the scales of these enigmatic mammals.
The new species has been named with the scientific name of “Mysteries of the hands” of the mysterious Asian pangolinreported the Xinhua news agency.
This discovery is considered “extraordinary” by experts, since more than 100 years have passed since the last discovery of a species of pangolon, the Philippine pangolin.
Pangolins are one of the most commonly found mammals. illegally traded in the world, which places them in a highly vulnerable category.
Until before this discovery, eight species of pangolins were knownall of them classified on the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and three of them classified as “critically endangered”.
Mysterious Asian pangolon was identified during molecular investigation of specimens seized from itThe Chinese regions of Yunnan and Hong Kong.
The results of this research were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The pangolin is one of the least studied animals in the world, and very little is known about the illegal trade in these mammals, highly valued for their scales and meat.
The main threat to these animals, both in Asia and increasingly in Africa, is poaching for international trafficking of wildlife.
In the last decade, enough pangolin scales have been seized to account for at least a million pangolins.
It is estimated that at least 250,000 pangolins are harvested each year from African and Asian forests to supply consumer demand in China, Vietnam, Western Europe and the United States.
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