First New Cat Species in a Hundred Years Discovered in Bolivia

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Una publicación compartida por National Geographic Society (@natgeosociety)

A new cat species has been discovered for the first time in over 100 years. And it all started with a man who wanted to help out a kitten about 10 years ago. After spotting a cute small feline on a road near a forest in Bolivia, the unidentified local man picked it up and took him home. However, this was no domestic cat. A year later, the man realized this furry friend had to be something else, so he handed it to the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary. The strange pet turned out to be completely unknown to science.

Known to locals as the tilcayo, the animal is smaller than a regular house cat, as it measures only about 18 inches long and weighs about 3 pounds. It has rounded ears and its fur is covered in leopard-like spots. It calls the Los Yungas forests of Bolivia home, a humid mountainous region often covered by clouds. Now, the tilcayo has just been described for the first time in the journal Current Biology.

Determining the tilcayo belonged to an entirely new species took a lot of work. The cat couldn’t easily be distinguished by appearance when biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz compared it to similar tiger cats from the neighboring country of Brazil. “If you look at the spots or the tail, they really don’t match,” she said. Instead, she turned to genetic testing, taking samples of the specimen found back in 2016 plus a similar animal that also wound up at Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary. There she found that the tilcayo was a new unique species, having spawned their own branch of tiger cat lineages about 1.4 million years ago.

The cat has received the scientific name Leopardus tilcayo, still paying homage to its local name. After all, while new to science, the local communities have long been aware of them. “This cat, they call it tilcayo. And when you ask, ‘Does it have some meaning in Quechua or Almyra and other Indigenous languages?’ they say, ‘No, my grandpa told me that’s the tilcayo,’” Nogales-Ascarrunz said. “This is a traditional knowledge that they have in the community. We want to preserve that knowledge and we didn’t want to give it another name.”

This history-making discovery is not just about this one creature; the finding of the tilcayo redraws the entire cat family tree and sets up the discovery of even more cat species around the world, many of which could be endangered. “Our world is extremely complex,” Nogales-Ascarrunz told National Geographic. “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. Even in the cats, there are things out there that are undescribed, things that people haven’t found yet. So let’s go out and find them and protect them.”