The Brazilian porcupine occurs in the northern Atlantic Forest of northeastern Brazil. Adults have three-banded quills along the back, giving a pale yellowish appearance with dark brown markings. In Pernambuco, a specimen was collected in lowland evergreen rainforest surrounded by sugar-cane fields.
Adults have mainly three-banded quills along the dorsal crest and two-banded quills on the rump. The quill bases are yellowish, the middle band is blackish, and the tips of three-banded quills are yellowish white. The resulting pattern is pale yellowish with dark brown markings. Dorsal quills are slightly curved and less than 10 cm long.
An adult male collected at Mata Xanguá, Pernambuco, in 2009 was designated as the name-bearing neotype. Its collection site was a patch of lowland evergreen tropical rainforest surrounded by sugar-cane fields. This records the species in a forest fragment within an agricultural landscape.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.