Dr. Ted Stankowich

Their ancestors had anal glands.

And all carnivores have anal glands that they use for communication purposes.

And so they had access to sort of stinky sulfur-based chemicals that they were using for communication that they co-opted.

in different ways and to different degrees to use for defense.

So they had something, a building block already there.

They were already emitting kind of stinky stuff already in communication.

You think about armadillos, there's evidence, fossil evidence that osteoderms, the bony plates that make up an armadillo's carapace, we can find bony osteoderms, individual ones, in the skins of fossil giant ground sloths.

What?

So the ancestors of the sloths and armadillos are in the same super order.

That's nuts.

I didn't know that.

There was probably a building block there that got enhanced in some way.

quills and spines are just modified hairs.

Pangolin scales are, it's keratin, it's modified hairs.

So they're taking what building block you have and modifying it away.

And whoever comes up with a good way of using it evolutionarily, it just gets elaborated and exaggerated more and more and more.

And I think it's just a, it's something that's fortuitous.

Now, if you're talking about an animal that is arboreal, that lives in trees, you probably don't want a thick coat of armor because it's so heavy.

Although pangolins, there are a bunch of tree pangolins, but they are smaller

in size.