A trail camera hidden in the forests just outside Shillong has captured something India's premier wildlife research body had never recorded there before: a living Chinese pangolin, one of the most heavily trafficked mammals on Earth, going about its business in the leaf litter.

  • 1st confirmed sighting of a Chinese pangolin in this Wildlife Institute of India study area
  • 6 other rare species caught on the same camera network, from leopard cats to yellow-throated martens
  • 2014 — the year the species was declared Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List
  • 2 forest patches involved: Riat Laban and Laitkor, both on Shillong's urban edge

A find on the edge of the city

The sighting came out of the Wildlife Institute of India's (WII) ongoing project, "Assessment of Mammalian Assemblages in Meghalaya." Researchers had trained motion-triggered cameras on the Riat Laban and Laitkor reserve forests, two peri-urban patches that sit right at the edges of Shillong, the capital of the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya.

Those cameras had never before picked up the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) inside this particular study footprint, making the image a genuine first for the project. The same traps also recorded the Large Indian Civet, Leopard Cat, Masked Palm Civet, Yellow-throated Marten, Indian Crested Porcupine, and Kalij Pheasant — an unusually dense cast of species for forest fragments squeezed between roads and rooftops.

Why a city-edge forest matters

Pangolins are shy, nocturnal, and built to avoid being seen, which is part of why a confirmed sighting carries real scientific weight. The Chinese pangolin has been listed as Critically Endangered since 2014, with wild populations estimated to have collapsed across its range through the northern Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and southern China — driven largely by demand for its scales and meat.

"Finding a critically endangered species like the Chinese pangolin sharing space with a rich suite of carnivores and small mammals proves that these urban forest patches are invaluable biodiversity strongholds that must be strictly protected and preserved," the Wildlife Institute of India said in a statement reported by IANS and the Sentinel.

Urban-fringe forests like these are easy to write off. They sit outside the boundaries of marquee national parks and tiger reserves, hemmed in by a fast-growing hill city, and are routinely assumed to be too small or too disturbed to support anything beyond common species.

What the find changes

This sighting argues otherwise, and researchers say that's the real headline. A single camera-trap frame showing a critically endangered, trafficking-targeted species living alongside six other uncommon mammals and birds is strong field evidence that these patches function as genuine biodiversity refuges rather than leftover green space waiting to be developed.

WII researchers note that captures like this one strengthen the case for formally protecting the Riat Laban and Laitkor forests, feeding directly into conservation planning for Meghalaya's forest department. Officials involved in anti-trafficking enforcement have also pointed to findings like this as a reason to keep investing in monitoring: every confirmed population, however small, matters for a species more often encountered in seized wildlife shipments than in its own habitat.

For now, the Chinese pangolin has one more data point on its side — a quiet, healthy presence in the hills just outside a state capital, caught on camera doing exactly what pangolins are supposed to do: staying hidden, and surviving.