A new cat species has been scientifically described – the diminutive, spotted tilcayo from Bolivia. A clutter of small cat species in the Leopardus genus live in South America, including the ocelot, margay, kodkod, Geoffroy’s cat and the tiger cat or oncilla. The similar appearance of these nocturnal and hard-to-spot cats has made separating them difficult.
This is particularly true of tiger cats, which are about the size of a house cat, and are found in Costa Rica in Central America, and across a vast swathe of South America including Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Historically, there have been many local and scientific names for them, but they all got subsumed into a single species, Leopardus tigrinus. Tiny orange frog around the size of a pencil tip is brand-new species Genetic studies have since divided the species into four, resurrecting three of the species names that scientists once used before they were all lumped together under the name L. tigrinus.
This process saw the official recognition of the southern tiger cat (Leopardus guttulus) in 2013, Leopardus emiliae in 2017 and the clouded tiger cat (Leopardus pardinoides) in 2024. Now, Eduardo Eizirik at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his colleagues have analysed the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, including 26 tiger cats from across their known range. The genomics revealed a fifth distinct species living in the Bolivian Yungas forests on the east slopes of the Andes mountains.
The researchers describe it under a completely new name: Leopardus tilcayo, naming it after the local term used for this cat. Who can’t love that?” says Leslie Lyons at the University of California, Davis. The genomes revealed that it diverged from the lineage containing L. tigrinus and L. pardinoides nearly 1.4 million years ago.
Domestic cats originated in North Africa and spread to Europe in the past 2000 years, according to DNA evidence, while in China a different species of cat lived alongside people much earlier Telling the new species apart visually is not easy. They’re morphologically very similar,” says team member Jonas Lescroart at University of Antwerp in Belgium. The researchers also found that in the Peruvian Yungas forests, on the west side of the Andes, there is a distinct group of cats in the L. tigrinus lineage that they describe as a novel subspecies, L. tigrinus antisuyo.
There are so many barriers in South America that can geographically isolate animal populations from each other, including mountains and rivers, that more cat species may be waiting to be found, says Lyons. Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.08.059
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