Scientists found a wild cat species nobody had described in over a century

A three-pound cat living at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia has been confirmed as a species new to science, the first wild cat formally described since 1923. Researchers named it Leopardus tilcayo, after the local word for the animal, following a genetic study that resolved a century-old puzzle about a group of small spotted cats scattered across South America.

The single known individual has lived since around 2017 at the Senda Verde Animal Refuge in Coroico, Bolivia, after a local family surrendered it. It remains the only Leopardus tilcayo in captivity anywhere, and no scientist has yet photographed or trapped one in the wild.

Museum bones from Guyana broke open a century-old tangle

The tiger cat complex — small, spotted felines known variously as tigrinas, little spotted cats or oncillas — had defied classification since the 1800s, when the original species, Leopardus tigrinus, was named from a single illustration of an animal from Cayenne, French Guiana. Dr. Jonas Lescroart, a researcher at the University of Antwerp and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul who led the new analysis, said the group’s subtle physical differences had produced “contradictory conclusions” for more than a century of taxonomists working from limited skeletal and mitochondrial data, according to a report on the published findings.

Lescroart’s team sequenced complete genomes from 38 individuals across the genus Leopardus, including DNA extracted from eight historical museum specimens. Among them were skull fragments collected in Guyana that supplied the first genetic data ever taken from the original type locality in the Guiana Shield, a population no one had managed to sample at the molecular level before. That analysis confirmed five genetically distinct lineages inside what had been treated as a single tangled species, alongside the already recognized southern tiger cat, Leopardus guttulus.

The cat diverged 1.4 million years ago in a shrinking cloud forest

Leopardus tilcayo lives only in Bolivia’s Yungas cloud forest, a narrow band of high-altitude forest running along the eastern slope of the Andes. According to the research team, the species split from its closest relatives roughly 1.4 million years ago during the Early Pleistocene, a period of swinging climate conditions that fragmented the region’s montane forest and likely sealed off the population that became Leopardus tilcayo, according to the paper published in Current Biology. The genomic data also picked up a second discovery: a previously unrecognized subspecies from Peru’s Yungas region, named Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo.

Physically, the new species stands out even next to its closest relatives. It has a head-body length of roughly 17 to 20 inches and a tail of about 10 to 10.4 inches, giving it a smaller frame than a typical house cat, and its coat carries relatively large, irregular dark brown to black rosettes over a light brown to beige background, paler toward the limbs. National Geographic Explorer Paola Nogales Ascarrunz, who led the field side of the research and has been documenting the species at Senda Verde, described the animal’s coloring as noticeably more muted than related tiger cats, with extra-large spot markings and a longer, more slender tail, according to National Geographic Society’s account of the discovery.

The same genomes revealed a steep, decades-long decline

Beyond settling the taxonomy, the genomic reconstruction traced population trends for every lineage in the complex back through the Pleistocene and into the Holocene. Nearly all of the tiger cat units showed a long-term decline, and several — including the newly described Leopardus tilcayo — showed population decreases of 60% or more over that span. Lescroart and his co-authors wrote that the findings “clarify the evolutionary history of a complex radiation of wild cats, reveal novel taxa, and serve as a basis for conservation planning on behalf of these elusive wild cats.”

Fabio Oliveira do Nascimento, a taxonomist at the Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo who was not involved in the study, said the tiger cat’s family tree had been “highly contentious and poorly understood” for decades, and that the new genomic work has begun “resolving long-standing questions while raising new ones,” according to Live Science’s interview with researchers on the study. One practical consequence follows directly from the reclassification: conservation status assessments that currently lump several tiger cat lineages together under a single “vulnerable” listing may need to be redone species by species, since a population that looked stable as part of a broader group could turn out to be far more threatened once counted on its own.

That conservation stake is why Nogales Ascarrunz keeps camera traps running through the Yungas forest, in the hope of capturing the first confirmed image of a wild Leopardus tilcayo. Every individual documented so far has come from a museum drawer or a single sanctuary enclosure, which means basic facts other newly described mammals usually have on record — a wild population estimate, a breeding range map, a diet — simply do not exist yet for this cat. “We still don’t know how many there are,” Nogales Ascarrunz told the Associated Press, adding that deforestation, wildlife trafficking and diseases spread by domestic dogs already threaten the forest the species depends on, according to PBS News’s report on the discovery.

The description arrives as taxonomists increasingly lean on whole-genome sequencing to untangle species complexes that morphology and older DNA techniques could not resolve, a shift that is quietly rewriting how many discrete cat species actually exist in the Americas. Until this study, the last time researchers had formally named a new living wild cat species anywhere in the world was 1923.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.