A Cat Hiding in Plain Sight
For the first time in more than a century, scientists have named and formally described a new species of living wild cat — and they found it not in some unexplored wilderness, but living quietly at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia. The animal, a small spotted feline now known as Leopardus tilcayo, is described in a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. Its announcement pushes the last comparable discovery back to 1923.
The sanctuary where the cat spent years sits in Bolivia's Yungas region, a landscape of tropical cloud forest in the Andes Mountains, roughly a couple of hours' drive from the administrative capital, La Paz.
How the Discovery Unfolded
The path to the identification began with a hunch. Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a Bolivian biologist, National Geographic explorer and one of the study's lead authors, was volunteering at the sanctuary when a colleague who thought the resident cat looked unusual invited her to examine it.
The animal's history was already out of the ordinary. A local family had come across it in the forest and tried to keep it as a pet, but eventually gave it up to the sanctuary, where it had been living ever since.
What struck Nogales-Ascarrunz most was the cat's size. The specimen — a male estimated to be about 10 years old — measures just 18 inches (46 centimeters) from the head to the base of the tail and weighs about 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms). That makes it smaller than an average house cat. Its coat is light brown, patterned with dark, leopardlike spots.
"Knowing other wild cats, it was peculiar," she said. "He really is tiny."
Reconstructing a Family Tree From Genomes
To work out where the mystery cat belonged in South America's feline family tree, the researchers turned to genetics. They compared genomes — complete sets of genetic instructions — from more than 30 cats sampled at locations including Colombia, Peru and Brazil.
Fresh samples were not available everywhere, so the team filled the gaps with DNA recovered from bones and skins preserved in museums in the United States and Europe. The resulting dataset gave the scientists a broad picture of how cat populations across the continent relate to one another, and where an outlier like the sanctuary male would sit.
- More than 30 cats compared, spanning Colombia, Peru and Brazil.
- Museum bones and skins supplied DNA in places where no fresh samples existed.
- The living animal was catalogued as L. tilcayo BOL-2, with voucher ID MNHN-L2.
A Lineage Separated for 1.4 Million Years
The genomic comparison produced a clear answer. The sanctuary cat did not match any species already known to science. Instead, it belonged to a previously unrecognized lineage whose ancestors split from those of its closest relatives roughly 1.4 million years ago.
That deep divergence helps explain why the animal looked so unlike anything familiar to the researchers who handled it. It also explains why the cat had gone unnoticed for so long: a species that resembles its relatives closely, and that lives in dense, hard-to-survey cloud forest, can persist well outside the scientific record. The paper's authors describe it as having been identified in plain sight.
The First Such Naming Since 1923
Formally describing a new living wild cat is a rare event. The last feline species to receive that treatment was the Uruguayan pampas cat in 1923, which means more than a century passed before the announcement of L. tilcayo.
Nogales-Ascarrunz noted that the species had simply never been collected or properly documented. "During naturalist expeditions in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, this cat was never collected and the species was never properly described," she said. Generations of explorers passed through the region without recording it, leaving the work of placing it in the feline family tree to genome sequencing rather than to a specimen jar.
A Name Drawn From Andean Communities
Many newly described species are named for the scientists or explorers who first encounter them. In this case, the researchers chose a different route. The name Leopardus tilcayo preserves a moniker already used by communities living in the tropical cloud forests of the Andes Mountains — a nod to the people whose landscape the cat shares, and who knew it long before it entered the scientific literature.
Why an Overlooked Species Matters
The discovery is a reminder that the work of cataloguing life on Earth is far from finished, and that some of the largest gaps sit in landscapes that surveys rarely reach. Tropical cloud forests such as the Yungas are difficult terrain to work in, and small, nocturnal or retiring animals are easy to overlook even for experienced field teams.
That has practical consequences. A species that has not been recognized cannot be counted, tracked or accounted for in conservation planning, and the animals living in a given forest may be fewer — or more diverse — than existing records suggest. Confirming that a distinct lineage has been hiding within a broader population of spotted cats changes the picture of how much feline diversity the Andes actually hold.
The Bolivian specimen also highlights an unusual research pathway: an animal that arrived at a sanctuary as an abandoned pet ended up providing the genetic material that anchored a new species description. Its genome, compared against dozens of others and supplemented by century-old museum tissue, was enough to establish that the tiny spotted male on the sanctuary grounds represented something no one had named before.
For now, Leopardus tilcayo joins a short line of formally described wild cats — a line whose most recent entry, until this week, was more than a hundred years old.
This article is based on reporting by Phys.org. Read the original article.
Originally published on phys.org
