Leopardus tilcayo becomes the first new living cat species named in a century

A small spotted cat from the Bolivian Yungas has been formally named Leopardus tilcayo, the first new living cat species described since the pampas cat in 1923. The paper appeared in Current Biology on Thursday, 17 September. Local communities already used the name tilcayo. The authors kept it.

The animal lives in cloud forest on the eastern slope of the Andes, where the mountains meet the Amazon basin. It measures about 46 centimetres and weighs about 1.4 kilograms, smaller than a typical house cat. The coat is light brown with irregular rosettes. The ears are short and rounded. The whiskers are long.

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a conservationist whose field work is funded by National Geographic, noticed the mismatch in 2019 at La Senda Verde, a sanctuary where she volunteered. A cat brought in there did not match reference images of Brazilian tiger cats. Tissue from that animal and from a second cat at the same refuge went into a genetic study. Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary biologist on the team, told Reuters the group had not expected a separate species.

Five tiger cats, not one

The researchers analysed DNA from 38 cats across South America, including eight museum specimens. The result is a split. What field guides treated as a single tiger-cat complex is five genetically distinct species. The Bolivian lineage diverged about 1.4 million years ago, a gap the authors treat as species-level in this genus. They also named a new subspecies in Peru’s Yungas, Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, after the Inca region Antisuyu.

Tadeu de Oliveira, an ecologist at the State University of Maranhão in Brazil and a co-author, said all five species live in habitats that are disappearing. The size of the tilcayo population is unknown. Nogales-Ascarrunz said no one yet knows how many remain in the wild. Naming a species is the step that lets Red List assessors open a file. It does not by itself create a park or a patrol.

Tiger cats are not lions. They are small, nocturnal, and easy to file under a neighbour’s name. That is why a century passed. The last widely accepted description of a new living felid was the pampas cat more than a hundred years ago. Camera traps and cheaper sequencing changed the odds. A volunteer at a sanctuary who refused to accept the nearest label did the rest.

The paper does not estimate a headcount or draw a final map. It gives a name, a forest, a body size, a divergence date and a list of four other species that now need their own assessments. Those are the facts a ministry or a donor can act on. The cat itself remains in the cloud forest, as it was before Thursday’s publication, only now with a binomial that zoologists can cite.