Key Takeaways
- Scientists have confirmed Leopardus tilcayo, a small spotted wildcat from Bolivia's Yungas cloud forest, as the first new living cat species described in more than 100 years.
- Genetic testing on cat samples from across South America and Central America found that what was treated as one "tiger cat" species is actually five distinct ones, forcing a fresh look at conservation status for each.
- The find comes as Bolivia battles some of the worst deforestation on Earth, with gold mining and farmland expansion eating into the very cloud forest where the tilcayo lives.
Scientists in Bolivia have confirmed a brand-new member of the cat family — something that hasn't happened anywhere on Earth in more than a hundred years. The animal, a small spotted feline known locally as the tilcayo, spent nearly a decade hiding in plain sight inside a Bolivian wildlife sanctuary before genetic testing exposed just how different it really is.
From "Weird Cat" to Scientific Mystery
The chain of events began in 2016, when biologist and National Geographic Explorer Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz fielded a call from a wildlife shelter outside La Paz. Staff there had just taken in an odd-looking spotted cat. A Bolivian man had picked it up as a kitten along a forest road, assumed it was an ordinary house cat, and raised it at home for close to a year before realizing it was wild and handing it over to the Senda Verde sanctuary.
Nogales-Ascarrunz was hooked from the first visit. "I took a hundred pictures of it," she later recalled. "I was so fascinated." At the time, she filed the cat away as an oddly marked member of Leopardus tigrinus, the catch-all label long used for small spotted "tiger cats" across Latin America. Three years later, while putting together a photo guide to Bolivia's wild cats, she noticed something: the rosettes patterning its coat dwarfed anything shown in her Brazilian reference images.
Genomes Reveal Five Hidden Species
Testing that hunch took years. Working alongside geneticist Eduardo Eizirik and evolutionary biologist Jonas Lescroart, of Brazil's Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and Belgium's University of Antwerp respectively, the team sequenced whole genomes from 38 cats gathered across South America and Central America, drawing on preserved museum specimens alongside living animals.
The results, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, upended years of assumptions: the tiger-cat group isn't one species but five genetically separate ones, including the newly named tilcayo alongside L. guttulus, L. emiliae, L. pardinoides and L. tigrinus. The same team carved out a new tiger-cat subspecies native to Peru's own stretch of Yungas forest, naming it Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, after Antisuyu, a quarter of the old Inca empire.
Of the five, the tilcayo turned out to be the outlier. Its lineage split from every other tiger cat roughly 1.4 million years ago — a gap researchers compare to the evolutionary distance separating today's lions from the long-extinct cave lion.
A Species Known From Just Two Cats
Despite the genetic certainty, almost nothing is known about how the tilcayo actually lives. Formal descriptions of the species draw on just two live individuals examined by researchers, plus a small handful of camera-trap sightings. One is a roughly ten-year-old male at Senda Verde, nicknamed Tigrino, who now serves as the species' official type specimen. Rodent remains found in scat samples hint at the tilcayo's diet, and camera-trap footage suggests it may be most active after dark.
Why Five Species Change the Conservation Math
The split matters well beyond taxonomy textbooks. Treating tiger cats as one widespread animal made it hard to argue that any single population needed urgent protection. Break that population into five distinct species, each confined to a smaller range, and the conservation picture shifts immediately — outside biologists note that every one of the five now needs its own separate assessment, since a healthy combined total can mask a struggling individual species.
Bolivia's Vanishing Cloud Forest
The timing adds urgency. Bolivia lost close to 1.8 million hectares of native forest in 2024 alone, with roughly five-sixths of that loss hitting untouched primary forest — a total that made the country the world's second most deforested nation that year, trailing only Brazil and nearly tripling its own losses from 2023.
Much of that destruction traces back to advancing farmland and cattle pasture, but gold mining, much of it unlicensed, now ranks among the fastest-growing forces behind the country's forest loss, pushing into legally protected Amazon reserves such as Madidi National Park.
What Comes Next
For now, Nogales-Ascarrunz is installing camera traps across the Yungas, hoping to document more tilcayos in the wild. She has framed the discovery as proof of how little is still understood about the region: "we need to protect the Yungas forests, which are home to so many species," she said. Researchers on the project believe the same genomic tools that unmasked the tilcayo could still be hiding other small, easily overlooked cats elsewhere on the planet.
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