Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting a wonderful family from Australia. Like most Aussies, they came armed with a sharp sense of humour and an even sharper ability to “chirp.” I’d like to think I gave as much as I got, and it made for a truly memorable few days in the bush. Running alongside the laughter was one consistent theme. Despite this being their fourth visit to Londolozi, they had never seen a pangolin. So if I ever brought up if there was anything in particular they were interested on us trying to find, the answer was always the same: “A pangolin.”

The humour, of course, lay in the impossibility of the request. Pangolins are incredibly rare, and all of us knew just how lucky one has to be to encounter one in the wild. One afternoon, while sitting on the Founders Camp deck before heading out on a drive, the conversation took an unexpected turn. I was asked a seemingly simple question: “What is the closest living relative to a pangolin?” My mind immediately went to the usual suspects — aardvark, anteater, even armadillo, as they all eat ants and termites, have strong claws for digging and have long sticky tongues.  But the more I thought about it, the less certain I became. A quick poll of the other guides nearby didn’t offer much more confidence. It became clear that this was not as straightforward as it seemed. So, right there on the deck, we began digging — and what we uncovered surprised all of us.

A memorable sighting this Mother Pangolin and her pup, a bucket list tick for many guides here at Londolozi and a picture I very much doubt i will ever get to capture again.

How Do We Know These Things?

Before diving into the answer, it’s worth briefly understanding how scientists determine relationships between species and estimate when they diverged. The first tool is the fossil record. Fossils give us minimum ages — if we find a pangolin ancestor fossil dated to 70 million years ago, we know that lineage existed at least that far back. These ages are determined using radiometric dating of surrounding rock layers, a highly reliable method. The second tool is what’s known as the molecular clock — a concept in Evolutionary biology. By comparing DNA between living species, scientists can measure how genetically different they are. Because mutations tend to accumulate at a relatively steady rate over time, this allows researchers to estimate when two species last shared a common ancestor. Together, these methods give us surprisingly accurate windows into deep time.

The Pangolin’s Unexpected Relatives

Surprisingly, it belongs alongside members of the order Carnivora — the group that includes lions, hyenas, wolves, and even domestic dogs. Pangolins themselves belong to their own order, Pholidota, but their nearest evolutionary relatives are all the carnivorans. To look at it another way: a pangolin is just as closely related to a domestic cat as it is to a grizzly bear, a honey badger, a lion, or a walrus.

Not aardvarks, anteaters, or armadillos as one might assume. This is a beautiful example of Convergent evolution — where completely unrelated animals evolve similar features because they occupy similar ecological roles. Pangolins, aardvarks, and anteaters have all developed long tongues, powerful claws, and reduced teeth for feeding on ants and termites, but they arrived at these adaptations independently. It’s one of nature’s great illusions.

A Lineage Older Than You Might Think

The split between pangolins and their closest relatives in Carnivora occurred roughly 70–80 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period. To put that into perspective, this means pangolins had already branched off as a distinct lineage while dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. The extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs happened around 66 million years ago — millions of years after pangolins had begun evolving along their own unique path. Compare that to the relationship between Lion and Leopard, which diverged only around 2–4 million years ago — a mere blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. The pangolin lineage tells a story that stretches back into that ancient world — a time when early mammals lived in the shadows of giants.

A Survivor of Deep Time

Pangolins have endured an extraordinary history. Their lineage has survived:

• The extinction of the dinosaurs
• Dramatic climatic shifts
• The movement of continents
• The rise of large mammalian predators

And yet today, their greatest threat is not natural — it is human. All eight species of pangolin are now threatened, primarily due to poaching and habitat loss. Tragically, the very scales that protected them for millions of years have become the reason they are targeted. Pangolins are widely regarded as the most trafficked mammals on Earth. An animal that has survived for tens of millions of years now faces the very real possibility of disappearing within our lifetime.

Back to the Beginning

And so, back to that original question on the Founders Camp deck — and the good-natured banter that sparked this journey. Over the course of that five-day stay, against the odds, we did indeed find a pangolin. To give that moment some context: I spend time on the road twice a day, most days that I am on site, and that sighting was only the second pangolin I had seen in the past year. And what a sighting it was — a large, healthy individual, moving quietly through the bush, completely unaware of the weight of history it carried with it. A living reminder of a lineage that has endured for millions of years.