Scientists name Leopardus tilcayo, the first new cat species in a century

A small spotted cat from the cloud forests on the eastern slope of the Bolivian Andes has been described as a new species, the first living felid given a fresh scientific name in more than 100 years. The paper, published on 17 September in Current Biology, calls it Leopardus tilcayo, using the word that people in the Yungas already use for the animal. The last comparable description was the pampas cat in 1923. Other recent "new" cats have been subspecies raised in rank. This one is not that.

National Geographic Explorer Paola Nogales Ascarrunz, who is Bolivian, led the fieldwork. Eduardo Eizirik and colleagues ran the genomics. The animal looks like the tiger cats, or oncillas, that range across parts of Central and South America. DNA says it is not those species. It split from the lineage that includes Leopardus tigrinus and Leopardus pardinoides about 1.4 million years ago. That is a long time to hide in a mountain forest that biologists have been walking through for generations.

Tigrino, three pounds, 18 inches

The reference animal is a male called Tigrino, now about ten years old, living at the Senda Verde refuge in the Yungas. He weighs around 1.4 kilograms, roughly three pounds, and measures about 46 centimetres from head to the base of the tail, plus or minus a few centimetres across the small sample. That is smaller than a typical house cat. The coat is light brown with dark rosettes. Reuters photographed him at the refuge on 1 September.

Tigrino spent part of his early life as a household pet before the refuge took him in. That accident is how the project started. Local hunters and farmers had always distinguished the tilcayo from other small spotted cats. When Nogales Ascarrunz asked why the name, she was told it was simply what grandparents had used. It does not appear to be a Spanish or Quechua word with a neat translation.

Five tiger cats, one thin file

South America's Leopardus group already included the ocelot, margay, kodkod, Geoffroy's cat and the tiger-cat cluster. The new paper treats tilcayo as a fifth tiger-cat species. Almost everything else about it is unknown: home-range size, diet beyond the obvious small vertebrates, breeding season, and how many animals are left. The Yungas is a wet, steep band of forest between the Altiplano and the Amazon. It is being cut for coca, pasture and roads. A cat that small does not turn up in trophy records, which is one reason it could sit undescribed.

Camera-trap surveys and more genomes will decide whether tilcayo is a Yungas endemic or a wider Andean form. For now the authors will only say it lives in that ecoregion. Conservation groups will want a Red List assessment. They do not have the numbers yet.

New mammal species still appear most years, usually rodents or bats. A carnivore that people can see with the naked eye is rarer. The tilcayo does not rewrite the cat family tree. It does say that a forest on a well-walked mountain still held a lineage 1.4 million years old that museums had filed under the wrong name.