A Bolivian cloud-forest cat is named Leopardus tilcayo

A small spotted cat from Bolivia's Yungas cloud forest has been described as a new species, Leopardus tilcayo, in Current Biology on 17 September. It is the first time in more than a hundred years that scientists have formally named a new living cat species, as opposed to raising a known subspecies to species rank. Local communities already called the animal tilcayo. The paper keeps that name.

The work was led by Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National Geographic Explorer, with Eduardo Eizirik at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre and colleagues. They sequenced complete genomes from 38 individuals across the Leopardus genus, including 26 tiger cats from the group's known range, and compared them with DNA from museum skins. The Yungas animals formed a distinct lineage that split from the line that includes Leopardus tigrinus and Leopardus pardinoides about 1.4 million years ago.

South America's small spotted cats have been rearranged several times this century. The southern tiger cat, L. guttulus, was recognised in 2013. L. emiliae followed in 2017. The clouded tiger cat, L. pardinoides, was raised from subspecies to species in 2024. Tilcayo is different in kind. It was not a labelled form waiting for a promotion. The type animal arrived at the Senda Verde refuge in the Bolivian Andes as a kitten in 2017, after a man found it on a forest road and handed it over as "a weird cat." Nogales-Ascarrunz has followed it since. The species is known from very few individuals. One account of the paper says two.

Measurements in the study put head-and-body length at 42.5 to 50.5 centimetres and tail length at 25 to 26.5 centimetres. Weight estimates vary by outlet between about 1.4 and 2 kilograms. All of those figures sit below a typical house cat. The coat is light brown with irregular rosettes. The ears are short and round. Nogales-Ascarrunz told IFLScience the face looks scrunched, "like a teddy bear." Reuters carried photographs of the Senda Verde animal taken on 1 September 2026 by Fernando Faciole. Joel Sartore photographed it for the National Geographic Photo Ark.

The Yungas is a wet, steep forest on the eastern slope of the Andes, often under cloud. That habitat is patchy and under pressure from roads, farming and settlement. A species known from a handful of animals in a shrinking forest is, by definition, hard to count and easy to lose. The paper does not pretend otherwise. It also does not invent a population size. The claim it can stand on is narrower and more useful: the genomes do not match the other four tiger cat species now recognised in South America.

Cat taxonomy is a graveyard of over-splitting and over-lumping. The authors' method is the part other labs can test. Whole genomes from living animals and museum specimens, sampled across the known range, produced a split dated in the early Pleistocene. If another team sequences more Yungas cats and they fall inside L. pardinoides or L. tigrinus, the name will be in trouble. If they fall outside, the species holds. That is a cleaner test than coat pattern arguments that occupied this group for decades.

Senda Verde still holds the animal that started the phone call ten years ago. It is a captive cat in a refuge, not a census of the forest. Field surveys, camera traps and more genomes from wild animals are the next step if anyone wants to know how many tilcayos exist and which valleys they use. Until those data exist, the durable fact from 17 September is the name and the split. A cat that people in the Yungas already had a word for now has a species name that other scientists can cite, argue with, or confirm.