It is rare for scientists to find a new species of cat. It is rarer still to find one that looks a lot like a cat you already know. But a small, spotted wild cat from the cloud forests of Bolivia has now been confirmed as a species of its own, and researchers say it is the first new living feline to be formally named and described in more than a century.
The animal is called the tilcayo by local communities, and the scientific name it has been given keeps that name: Leopardus tilcayo. The findings were published on Thursday 17 September in the journal Current Biology.
A small cat, hiding in plain sight
The tilcayo measures about 46 cm (18 in) long and weighs roughly 1.4 kg (3 lb), smaller than the average domestic cat, The Guardian reported. Its fur is light brown with irregular rosettes across the body, said Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, one of the study’s authors. It lives in the Yungas, a mountainous region of Bolivia where the forest is often wrapped in cloud and high humidity.
It escaped notice because it belongs to a group called tiger cats, small spotted cats found from Costa Rica to Argentina that look so alike that even experts struggle to tell them apart. Scientists call such animals “cryptic species”. As mammals expert Andrew Kitchener of National Museums Scotland, who was not involved, put it to the BBC, tiger cats have been a “taxonomic nightmare”.
How the discovery happened
The trail began with a 10-year-old male cat nicknamed Tigrino, kept at the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia. A local resident had found him in the forest and taken him for a domestic kitten, but as he grew it became clear he did not behave like a house cat. Dr Nogales-Ascarrunz, volunteering at the sanctuary, noticed he did not match the descriptions of tiger cats, most of which are based on Brazilian animals.
She teamed up with researchers around the world to compare DNA from 38 cats sampled across several South American countries, eight of them museum specimens. The team, which included Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp and Eduardo Eizirik of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, found that the Bolivian cat’s lineage split from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago, a gap that is generally considered a species-level divide in cats. “There’s so few records or pictures, no individual in a museum, so it was hiding because nobody was looking,” Eizirik told the BBC.
- 46 cmApproximate body length
- 1.4 kgApproximate weight
- 38Cats whose DNA was analysed
- 1.4m yrsEstimated time since its lineage split from other tiger cats
Three tiger cat species become five
The study did more than add one animal. It found that tiger cats, long thought to be one species and later three, are in fact five genetically distinct species. The researchers also described a new subspecies of tiger cat in Peru’s Yungas region, Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo. Officially there are 41 recognised species in the cat family, Felidae, and the BBC reported that the new findings bring the number to 44 or more.
What we still do not know
Almost nothing is known about the tilcayo’s life. Remains of small rodents in droppings suggest they are part of its diet, and camera-trap footage suggests it may be more active at night. The evidence base is small: The Guardian reported that the researchers examined two live individuals plus a handful of camera-trap records, and the BBC described one confirmed living animal in a sanctuary, although scientists believe others exist in the wild. That is why the authors say it is important to look for more of them.
Conservation is the next step
Tiger cat species are considered vulnerable to extinction because of deforestation, habitat loss and illegal hunting. The tilcayo was missing from previous assessments because nobody knew it existed. Caroline Sartor of the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, a co-author, said it is impossible to protect a species without knowing what it is and where it lives. Now that it has a name, researchers can start measuring how many there are, where they live and what threatens them.
