KATHMANDU — The animal Brian Houghton Hodgson saw looked almost like a pangolin, but it didn’t tick all the boxes. It had amor-like scales from head to tail, just as the French zoologist Georges Cuvier had earlier described. But it also had ears and far more scales across its trunk than any recorded species. The year was 1836. For the 35-year-old British diplomat and pioneering naturalist, who was confined to Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, this demanded an investigation: Was it a new species, or just an outlier? Convinced he had come across an undescribed species, he gave the animal a name built entirely on those ears, Manis auritus: The Latin auritus translates to “with large ears.” But he hedged it with a backup name, Plurisquamis, “the many-scaled,” in case the ears turned out later to be an unremarkable feature. Nearly two centuries later, his question finally has a plausible answer. A team of scientists spanning Asia, the Americas and Europe has spent five years building the case that the pangolin Hodgson described in 1836 is in fact a separate species, distinct from the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) it had long been lumped together with and the seven other recorded species.
Their recently published findings also establish its name, now called the Himalayan pangolin, and carry immediate consequences for conservation. Across their Africana and Asian ranges, they’re all endangered, so heavily targeted for illegal trade that they’re considered the most smuggled mammals on Earth. They are killed for their meat as well as scales under the guise of traditional medicine. Reaching consensus on taxonomy took a string of smuggling busts and decades of independent research by different teams working without knowledge of each other. In the end, it was Hodgson’s own words, and an almost two-century-old museum specimen, that sealed the case for the Himalayan pangolin.
Nearly 180 years after Hodgson’s observations, between 2016 and 2017, Chinese researchers led by Jiang-Yong Hu were sequencing DNA from pangolin scales seized from smugglers at the China-Myanmar border. They expected to confirm the scales belonged to Chinese pangolins, the sole species believed to occur in the region. Instead, the samples split into two distinct genetic groups. One matched the known Chinese pangolin. The other, labeled MPB, didn’t match any profile on record.
This posed a question strikingly similar to the one Hodgson had faced in Kathmandu nearly two centuries earlier: Were they onto a new species? The answer wasn’t easy, since the researchers didn’t know where to find MPB pangolins in the wild. All they knew was where the scales had been seized near the Myanmar border. Around the same time, in Kathmandu Valley, Nepali researcher Narayan Prasad Koju was running a separate investigation, setting camera traps to photograph pangolins at night and collecting droppings for DNA testing. He also noticed that DNA from Kathmandu’s pangolins looked meaningfully different from China’s, and documented it in a 2018 report to Nepal’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. Because the study was conducted on a limited budget, Koju said, “we didn’t have enough of a sample size to submit it for peer review or make any claim.”
The connection between the two parallel investigations came through Kai He, a biologist now at Guangzhou University in China, who had known Koju for years. “Back in 2020, there was no information about the Chinese pangolin in the western part of Myanmar, Nepal and northeastern India,” he told Mongabay.
When Koju sent him gene sequences from Nepal, he compared them against the unidentified MPB lineage discovered among the smuggled animals from Myanmar. When he analyzed the data, he realized: Those sequences were exactly the same as sequences that had come from Nepal. He and Koju suspected they were sitting on evidence of a new pangolin species. They set out to prove it, contacting museums across the U.S. and Europe that had large pangolin collections to make morphological comparisons. One image that came back from a London museum carried an unfamiliar label: Manis aurita. “Until that point, we didn’t know about Hodgson’s observation of a new pangolin species,” Koju said.
Searching the label online, Koju found Hodgson’s original 1836 description in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Two details had caught Hodgson’s eye: The number of scales, and a distinct pair of external ears. “The external ear, though small, is perfectly distinct,” Hodgson had written, adding that his specimen carried “23 [scales] for the neck and body alone; there being also 10 for the head, and 19 for the tail” — more scales, he noted, than any known pangolin. Based on the ears, Hodgson named the animal auritus — the hedge about Plurisquamis tucked into the same paragraph. English zoologist George Robert Waterhouse later revised auritus to aurita, since the genus Manis required a feminine species name. Then, in 1918, the name was demoted to a subspecies. By 1951, it had vanished entirely, absorbed into the Chinese pangolin with no separate identity left at all.
A 19th-century name, though, wasn’t proof. “We did a lot of analyses … that’s why it took us several years,” he said. Koju, now a researcher at Nepal Engineering College at Pokhara University, said “the team extracted DNA and measured skulls and skins from museum collections in London, Chicago and Kunming … from 2019 until 2024.” The scale of the effort was substantial. Researchers collected full genomes from 55 pangolins and smaller DNA fragments, known as mitogenomes, from 70 more. Seven of those samples came specifically from the Himalayan pangolin lineage — including DNA extracted from the very specimen Hodgson himself had sent to London during the 19th century. Beyond DNA, the team wanted to know whether the animals looked different, not just whether their genes did. They examined and measured 44 skulls and 26 skins; seven skulls and six skins were Himalayan pangolins. Some 20 researchers from 12 institutions across seven countries contributed to the work.
The team wanted to see the complete DNA results from the Hodgson specimen before making their results public, Koju said. “To do that, we had to wait for a long time, as the museum was transferring its mammal collection to a new facility.” Before he and Koju could publish, a rival team reached the finish line ahead of them — working independently, with no knowledge of the five-year effort already underway. In early 2025, researchers led by Lenrik Konchok Wangmo described what they called a brand-new species, Manis indoburmanica, the “Indo-Burmese pangolin,” based on mitochondrial DNA from confiscated scales. He and Koju were surprised that they’d ignored the name Manis aurita. “That name has been there — the paper has been there — for more than 100 years,” Koju said.
Mukesh Thakur, co-author of the study published in Mammalian Biology, defended their choice, saying that it reflected the limits of available data, not oversight. “The name aurita was very old — very classical — and it had not been popularized or even recognized by IUCN, nor was it in the major databases,” he said. No public DNA sequence existed anywhere under that name. “So when we didn’t know what aurita looked like, how could we say this is aurita?” Mammalogist Jelle S. Zijlstra’s commentary made the same argument in Mammalian Biology, citing nomenclature rules that give priority to the older name. Thakur’s team defended its description in a published reply. Speaking to Mongabay recently, Thakur declined to confirm or dispute the naming of the species as Manis aurita, deferring instead to the IUCN process. IUCN is the global wildlife conservation authority.
What finally resolved the naming dispute was Hodgson’s own specimen — the skin he had shipped to London nearly two centuries earlier. Its DNA matched the rest of the MPB samples, confirming they belonged to the same species. Following the DNA results, the authors of the 2026 study proposed that their findings relegate Manis indoburmanica to a junior synonym — an outdated name no longer in use, though still recorded in the scientific literature.
South Asia’s two known pangolin species are named the Chinese and Indian pangolins, which raises a question: Why not call this one the Nepali pangolin, since it was first described there? Kai He said he was open to that name. Koju favored “Himalayan” instead, arguing the species’ range likely extends across the broader Himalayan foothills, not just Nepal.
The confirmation is more than a taxonomic exercise, said Kumar Paudel, South Asia co-chair of the IUCN Pangolin Specialist Group, who wasn’t involved in the study. Recognizing a distinct species allows for more targeted conservation approaches, he said. The Chinese pangolin is already categorized as “critically endangered” by IUCN. Hence, the Himalayan pangolin would most likely fit that category as well, Koju said. The study also served a warning: Himalayan pangolins in Kathmandu Valley showed unusually high levels of inbreeding, consistent with breeding between close relatives. “What is bad about that,” he said, “is that it will highly decrease the genetic diversity in the genome of that animal species,” leaving the population less able to withstand disease or a shifting climate. He recommended protecting the existing Kathmandu population and, where feasible, introduce individuals from elsewhere in the species’ range.
Koju said more field surveys are needed to map the Himalayan pangolin’s full range, particularly in western Nepal and along the Myanmar border, where access remains difficult. The IUCN Pangolin Specialist Group has not yet recognized the Himalayan pangolin as a new species. Mongabay asked the group’s co-chair, Matthew Shirley, for comment on the new discovery; he had not replied as of publication. Meanwhile, teams of researchers are working on documenting at least two other potential new species in Southeast Asia.
Hodgson died in 1894, still uncertain whether aurita would hold as a unique species, or whether some future naturalist would need to reach for his backup name and call the animal, more modestly, “the many-scaled.” For nearly two centuries, the name was buried, folded into a more common species, forgotten by every major catalogue that mattered. The French zoologist Cuvier, it turns out, had been wrong about the pangolins’ ears. Every Asian species carries some form of external ear, not just Hodgson’s. The “remarkable peculiarity” he’d staked his name on was never as remarkable as he believed. He was right about the animal, but wrong about what made it unusual. Plurisquamis remains exactly what he left it as, his private hedge for the future. But it was, in the end, the more honest description of what made the Himalayan pangolin truly unique.
Banner image: A museum specimen of Manus aurita. Image courtesy of Narayan Koju.
Citations: Koju, N. P., Zeng, Z., Zhang, G., Yao, Z., Huang, X., Wang, X., … Hua, Y. (2026). Revalidation of Manis Aurita based on integrative genomic and morphological evidence. Communications Biology, 9(1). doi:10.1038/s42003-026-10314-9 Hu, J.-Y., Hao, Z.-Q., Frantz, L., Wu, S.-F., Chen, W., Jiang, Y.-F., … Yu, L. (2020). Genomic consequences of population decline in critically endangered pangolins and their demographic histories. National Science Review, 7(4), 798–814. doi:10.1093/nsr/nwaa031 Koju, N. P. (2018). Abundance and phylogenetic status of Chinese Pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) from Kathmandu valley, Nepal [Unpublished report]. Nepal Engineering College, Pokhara University. Submitted to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Nepal Government.
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/04/in-nepal-controversial-dam-threatens-endangered-pangolins-study/
