Leopardus tilcayo: Bolivia’s cloud-forest cat is the first new feline species named since 1923

A spotted wildcat that lives in the Bolivian Yungas has been formally described as a new species, Leopardus tilcayo, in a paper published this week in Current Biology. It is the first living feline species given a new scientific name since the pampas cat was described in 1923. Other South American cats have been raised from subspecies to species in recent years. Tilcayo is different. It was not previously listed as a separate animal at all.

Adults weigh about 1.4 kilograms, roughly three pounds, and measure about 46 centimetres from head to body. That is smaller than a typical house cat. The coat is leopard-spotted. The range, as now defined, is the Yungas cloud forest on the eastern slope of the Andes, the wet belt between the high mountains and the Amazon basin.

How a sanctuary call became a type specimen

The animal that forced the question was a kitten that had lived briefly as a house pet before reaching a refuge. Researchers named him Tigrino. Paola Nogales Ascarrunz, who led the Bolivian side of the work, was asked to look at a cat that did not sit easily with the local list. Genetic tests against other tiger cats showed a split deep enough to treat as a species. Co-author Jonas Lescroart said the team had not expected the Bolivian animal to stand apart and that no one had proposed it even as a subspecies.

The study recasts the tiger-cat group. Animals once treated as a small number of species across Central and South America resolve, on this analysis, into five genetically distinct species. The tilcayo line separated from its closest relatives about 1.4 million years ago. That date is the load-bearing number. A recent look-alike in the same forest would have been a colour morph. A 1.4-million-year split is a phylogenetic claim.

The name that was already in use

Communities in the Yungas already used the word tilcayo. The authors kept it. That decision is more than courtesy. It records that the animal was known to people who live with it and unknown to the catalogue that museum drawers and field guides rely on. National Geographic and the Bolivian information agency ABI both stressed that point in their accounts of the paper.

Nogales Ascarrunz was photographed with the cat at the Senda Verde refuge in the Yungas on 1 September, a picture distributed with the announcement. Tigrino is one individual. The species claim rests on the genetic sample set behind the paper, not on a single celebrity kitten. The kitten is how the sample set was assembled.

What the listing changes

A named species can be assessed for threat status, written into reserve plans, and used to block habitat loss in a forest belt that is already cut by roads, coca plots and settlement. The Yungas is not an empty cloud. It is a working landscape. A three-pound cat that no one had listed is now a unit that a ministry or a donor can put on a form.

The caution is ordinary. Sample sizes in rare-forest carnivores are small. Future work may move the boundaries of the five tiger-cat species the authors now count. What will not move is the 1923 marker. For a hundred years the living cat family did not gain a new named species from a clean description. This week it did, and the name on the page is the one people in the Yungas already used.