A New Pangolin Species Was Hiding in Kathmandu Valley for 190 Years
DNA from a 190-year-old museum skin just confirmed Nepal has its own pangolin species — living in ordinary community forests that ring the capital.
A pangolin collected in Nepal in the 1830s sat in a London museum drawer for 190 years, labelled as the wrong species. This year, DNA extracted from that same fragile skin proved everyone wrong: Nepal has its own pangolin, found nowhere else on Earth, and it has been hiding in plain sight the whole time — including in community forests a short drive from Kathmandu.
Key facts
- The Himalayan pangolin (Manis aurita) was confirmed as a distinct species in a 2026 study, 190 years after a specimen was first collected in Nepal.
- The breakthrough came from DNA in a skin specimen collected by naturalist Brian Hodgson in Nepal in the 1830s, held at London's Natural History Museum.
- Researchers cross-checked it against 44 museum skulls and 26 skins from London, Chicago and Kunming, plus 55 full genomes and 70 mitogenomes.
- The study involved roughly 20 researchers across 12 institutions in 7 countries, published in Communications Biology.
The story starts with smuggled scales. Between 2016 and 2017, wildlife-trade investigators sequencing seized pangolin scales kept finding a genetic lineage that matched nothing on record — researchers labelled it simply “MPB” and moved on, assuming it was a strange variant of the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), the species long assumed to cover Nepal's mid-hills too. It took a decade, and a trip back to a 190-year-old museum skin, to solve it.
That skin belonged to Brian Hodgson, the British naturalist who spent decades in Kathmandu in the 1800s cataloguing Nepal's wildlife. He was the first to formally describe the species in 1836, naming it Manis aurita — “the eared pangolin” — for its unusually large ear flaps. For nearly two centuries afterward, taxonomists folded it into the Chinese pangolin and the name was all but forgotten. Lead researchers Narayan Prasad Koju and Kai He, working with an international team, pulled DNA from Hodgson's original skin and matched it precisely to the mystery “MPB” lineage from the smuggled scales. The eared pangolin was real, and Hodgson had been right the whole time.
| Trait | Himalayan pangolin | Chinese pangolin |
|---|---|---|
| Scientific name | Manis aurita | Manis pentadactyla |
| First described | 1836, Nepal | 1822, China |
| Confirmed distinct | 2026 | — |
| Known range | Nepal Himalaya, Kathmandu Valley | Southern China, parts of SE Asia |
What makes this more than a taxonomy footnote is where the surviving population actually lives: not in some untouched wilderness, but in the community forests that ring the Kathmandu Valley — the same patchwork of terraced hillsides, chautari resting spots and sacred groves that our own valley day-hikes pass through. Researchers found the Kathmandu-area population shows unusually high inbreeding, a red flag for a species that was never counted separately until now and will likely be assessed as Critically Endangered once the IUCN formally reviews it. A species can spend two centuries as a footnote in someone else's file and still end up this close to disappearing before anyone properly counted it.
What this means for trekkers
What this means for you
Don't expect to see one. Pangolins are nocturnal, solitary and among the most trafficked mammals on Earth precisely because they're so rarely spotted alive. But the discovery is a reminder that Nepal's biodiversity value isn't confined to the high passes — it's in the community forests, sacred groves and lowland reserves that trekkers walk past on the way to the trailhead, the same lowland belt that produced this year's first-ever national snow leopard count. Chitwan and Bardia, our two jungle safari regions, are where guests have the best realistic chance of spotting fresh signs of the country's quieter, harder-to-see wildlife alongside rhinos and tigers.
For us in Pokhara, the find lands close to home in a different way. It's a reminder that some of what makes Nepal's Himalaya extraordinary was never on a summit list at all. It was filed, mislabelled, and waiting in a drawer for someone to look again.
Source: Mongabay.
Cover photo: Clinton Weaver via Pexels (Pexels License).
来源： Mongabay
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