Following the discovery of the previously newest cat species, the pampas cat, in 1923, a new species has been formally named after over 100 years. This new species is the L. tilcayo, a type of tiger cat that lives in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion, lying on the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains.
Initially, a local man found a kitten on a road near a forest, ultimately choosing to take it home after concluding that it was likely a domestic breed — a belief countered by the following year of caring for the cat that revealed its wild nature. This realization would cause the man to send it off to a local wildlife sanctuary. Working in Bolivia in 2017, biologist and National Geographic explorer Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz would receive a call from the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary on the subtropical flank of the Bolivian Andes that had received a “weird cat.” As the lead scientist and founder of the Bolivian Felids Research Program, she was intrigued. Upon arrival, she noted its scrunched-up face, short and round ears, long whiskers, leopard-like spots, and notably small body size — too small, in fact, to be a housecat.
Despite its features, she was unaware at the time that this “weird cat” would later hold the title of the first new species of felid (the cat family) discovered in over 100 years, according to the later study published September 17, 2026, in the journal Current Biology. Furthermore, the L. tilcayo is not only a newly named species, but it is new to science as a whole, being neither a case of a validation of a species proposed in the past nor a formerly recognized subspecies raised to such a status (which is more common).
Nogales-Ascarrunz originally assumed the cat was a member of the species Leopardus tigrinus (called tigrinas, oncillas, tigrillos, or little spotted cats) that was first described back in 1775 from an illustration of an animal seen in French Guiana and presumed to exist across Central and South America. However, while preparing a booklet of Bolivia’s cat species in 2019, she realized the cat that she’d seen and photographed did not resemble the guidebook reference photo from nearby Brazil, noting its much larger rosettes than those across the border.
Over the next few years, she developed her skills in genetic analysis and formed a research team with geneticist Eduardo Eizirik at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and co-lead study author Jonas Lescroart from the University of Antwerp. Together they sought to find the cat’s distinct place in the family tree. What their efforts revealed was not only that it is a unique species that they would go on to dub Leopardus tilcayo in honor of the word the local people knew it by, but when using modern genomics to compare complete genomes from 38 individuals across the Leopardus genus, they found that it was not only different from the other tiger cat species but actually diverged from them around 1.4 million years ago — an evolutionary distance similar to that of modern lions and cave lions that went extinct around 13,000 years ago.
Due to the species being recognized only recently, there is still much mystery about the species in their day-to-day lives: what they eat, what eats them, how they reproduce, etc. Reflecting on this and hopes for further research to be launched in pursuit of finding more about this species, and potentially more species using similar methods as this recent study, Nogales-Ascarrunz remarked that, “even in the cats, there are things out there that are undescribed, things that people haven’t found yet…So let’s go out and find them and protect them.”
