The tail is muscular and fully prehensile, wrapping around branches to anchor the animal while it uses its forelimbs to tear open ant and termite nests. Scales on the underside of the tail tip provide extra grip, and the tail can support the pangolin's full body weight during climbing or while it hangs to reach insect colonies on thinner branches.
Adult head-and-body length runs roughly 33 to 43 centimetres, while the tail commonly reaches 49 to 65 centimetres, making it noticeably longer than the rest of the animal. This proportion is more extreme than in the mostly terrestrial pangolin species, reflecting its arboreal lifestyle.
Population trends are hard to verify because the species is nocturnal, tree-dwelling, and secretive, and because illegal trade removes many animals before they can be surveyed. A persistent misreporting is treating all pangolin species as equally arboreal or equally long-tailed, when tail proportions vary considerably across the eight recognised species.