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Meet the First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
A small, spotted tiger cat from Bolivia may just bethe beginning of a wave of new small cat species.
In 2017, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a biologist and National Geographic Explorer working in Bolivia, received a call from a local wildlife sanctuary that had just been given what they described as “a weird cat.” It came from a local man who found it as a kitten on a road near a forest. The man took the animal home, believing it to be a domestic breed. But after about a year of living with the clearly wild animal, he realized it would be better off at a sanctuary.
Meet the Adorable and Tiny Tilcayo, the First Brand-New Cat Species Identified in More Than a Century
For the first time in more than 100 years, scientists have identified a new species of wild cat.
The diminutive feline, dubbed the tilcayo, lives in the Bolivian Yungas, the cloud forest where the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon basin. It’s smaller than a house cat, weighing just three to four pounds, and has large, irregularly shaped rosettes dotting its light brown fur.
Scientists say the creature, which they describe in a study published September 17 in the journal Current Biology, is a reminder that the natural world still holds plenty of mysteries.
“Our world is extremely complex,” study co-author Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a biologist and the founder of the Bolivian Felids Research Program, tells National Geographic’s Jason Bittel. “Sometimes we think that most of it is known, that there’s not a whole lot to discover, but in fact, it’s the other way around.”
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Scientists discover a new tiger cat hiding in plain sight
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For decades, scientists struggled to sort out South America’s tiger cats. Now, using whole-genome data from 38 individuals, including museum specimens, researchers have found that what scientists once treated as a single group actually contains five distinct species.
And they’ve identified and formally described a new tiger cat species, Leopardus tilcayo.
It’s the first new living cat species formally recognized in more than a century. The researchers estimate that the L. tilcayo lineage diverged from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. It is knowon from Bolivia’s Yungas region, a mountainous area on the eastern slopes of the Andes, where forests connect the high Andes with the Amazon. The area is difficult to explore, but rich in wildlife.
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