Leopardus tilcayo: Bolivia’s cloud-forest cat is the first new living feline named in a century

A small spotted cat from Bolivia's Yungas cloud forest has been formally named Leopardus tilcayo, the first new living cat species described in more than a hundred years. The paper appeared on Thursday in Current Biology. National Geographic Explorer Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz is among the lead authors. Eduardo Eizirik, who worked on the genomes, told New Scientist the animal had never been scientifically named.

Local communities already had a word for it: tilcayo. Researchers kept that name. The cat lives on the eastern slope of the Andes, in the wet, often cloud-covered band of forest between the high mountains and the Amazon basin. A photograph released with the study shows one of the animals at the Senda Verde refuge in the Yungas on 1 September.

How big it is, and how it was missed

Head and body length runs from about 42 to 50 centimetres. Weight sits between 1.4 and 2 kilograms, below a typical house cat. The coat is light brown with irregular dark rosettes. At a glance it looks like a leopard reduced to kitten scale. That resemblance is why earlier field workers folded it into the tiger-cat group that already includes several Leopardus species across South America: ocelot, margay, kodkod, Geoffroy's cat and the oncilla.

The identification took the better part of a decade. The path began with a kitten that did not match the books. Genetic work then showed a separate lineage. The genomes put the split from the line that includes Leopardus tigrinus and Leopardus pardinoides at about 1.4 million years. That is old enough, the authors argue, to treat tilcayo as a species rather than a local colour form.

The same paper names a new subspecies in Peru's Yungas, Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, after Antisuyu, the Inca name for the eastern quarter of the old empire. That animal stays inside an existing species. The Bolivian cat does not.

What "first in a century" actually means

The last widely cited description of a new living cat species was the pampas cat in 1923. Later decades produced subspecies, revalidations and splits inside known groups. A clean new name for a living feline is rare because most of the world's cats were collected, skinned and catalogued when European museums were still filling drawers. The Yungas still had a gap because the forest is steep, wet and hard to survey, and because the animal is small enough to be logged as a known tiger cat by anyone working from a photograph alone.

Species rank is not a trophy. It changes how conservation law counts the animal. A form buried inside L. tigrinus can vanish from a single mountain chain without moving the global status of the parent species. A named species with a tight range in the Bolivian Yungas can be listed, funded and protected on its own numbers.

Those numbers are not yet in the paper as a population estimate. The authors have a morphology, a genome, a locality and a local name. Camera-trap work and range mapping will have to follow. Until then the practical fact is simple: the cloud forest on the east slope of the Bolivian Andes holds a cat that science did not have a name for, and now it does.