This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A previously unknown cat species has been identified in plain sight: at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia, where the small, spotted feline had been living for years. The discovery, reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology, marks the first time scientists have named and described a new living wild cat species in more than a century.
Bolivian biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National Geographic explorer and one of the study's lead authors, said a colleague who thought the cat looked unusual invited her to examine it at the sanctuary in the country's Yungas region, where she volunteered, a couple hours' drive from the administrative capital of La Paz. A local family had left it there after finding it in the forest and struggling to keep it as a pet. What struck her was its size, she said—smaller than an average house cat, the male, now about 10 years old, measures 18 inches (46 centimeters) from its head to the base of its tail and weighs just 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms).
Its light brown coat is patterned with dark, leopardlike spots. "Knowing other wild cats, it was peculiar," she said. "He really is tiny." To locate the cat in South America's feline family tree, researchers compared genomes—complete sets of genetic instructions—from over 30 cats across locations including Colombia, Peru and Brazil.
Bones and skins preserved in U.S. and European museums supplied DNA to fill the gaps where fresh samples were unavailable. The analysis revealed that the sanctuary cat belonged to a previously unrecognized species whose lineage split from its relatives about 1.4 million years ago. The last feline species formally identified was the Uruguayan pampas cat in 1923.
"During naturalist expeditions in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, this cat was never collected and the species was never properly described," Nogales-Ascarrunz said. While some species are named after scientists or explorers, the researchers named this one Leopardus tilcayo, preserving the moniker used by communities in the tropical cloud forests of the Andes Mountains in Bolivia where the animal lives. "This isn't an animal that nobody had ever seen before.
Local communities knew it existed, but until now science had not recognized it as a separate species," said Wai-Ming Wong, an expert with the global wild cat conservation group Panthera, in an email. Wong had no role in the new research. The findings helped unravel a longstanding mystery about South America's tiger cats, which scientists once classified as a single species because they look so much alike.
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