Potential Fifth Asian Pangolin Species?

birdsandbats said:
It must be VERY endangered if we don't already know about it.
Click to expand...

Or it´s a crypic species that is hard to differentiate unless you see the genetical profile.

Woud love o see the pics of these animals and at least approximate range in wild nature.
 
My understanding, like Jana, that it is a cryptic species, thought to be a subspecies/population of known pangolins.

It should be easy to pinpoint where it lives using museum specimens.
 
Jana said:
Woud love o see the pics of these animals and at least approximate range in wild nature.
Click to expand...
The "potential fifth Asian pangolin species" is known only from scales, so neither its appearance nor its distribution is known.

The new paper is still only available as an abstract so I don't know what it says, but the scales involved were in two large shipments intercepted in Hong Kong in 2012 (224kg of scales) and 2013 (312kg of scales and 932kg of carcasses).

Paper here (2015): Molecular tracing of confiscated pangolin scales for conservation and illegal trade monitoring in Southeast Asia - ScienceDirect

(Clade A below is the "potential new species" of the 2020 paper - at the time of the 2015 paper M. culionensis of the Philippines had not been genetically sampled)

There are several possible identities for Clade A. One possible identity is M. culionensis, a sister-species of M. javanica or which no published genetic data is available. Alternatively, Clade A may correspond to an unknown lineage of M. javanica, or a cryptic pangolin species distributed within the range of M. javanica. The COI distance between Clade A and M. javanica was high (8.7%), possibly indicative of species-level divergence. Unfortunately, we could not obtain information on the geographic origin of those pangolins. A detailed population genetic study of M. javanica and M. culionensis will be needed to better trace the delineation of taxonomic lineages.

Further:

Discovery of multiple clades and large genetic divergence were also found from seized pangolin scales by using mitochondrial D-loop in Taiwan, and most of those scales are likely to belong to M. javanica. As little is known about intra-specific genetic diversity of M. javanica, the present study has offered new insights into the cryptic genetic diversity of this species and suggests it is composed of different genetic lineages that may constitute different management units or species.



 
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