New Cat Species Identified in Bolivia's Yungas Forest

New Cat Species Identified in Bolivia's Yungas Forest

A new cat species has been identified in Bolivia's Yungas forest. It's the first formally named living feline to emerge in more than a century. The animal is smaller than the average house cat, and it has lived under the noses of scientists for decades without anyone realizing it was its own species.

Local communities call it the tilcayo. Researchers have now given it the scientific name Leopardus tilcayo, keeping the name that people in the region already used. The cat measures about 18 inches (46 centimeters) long and weighs roughly 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms). That makes it a featherweight among wild felines, roughly the size of a large kitten that never grows up.

It belongs to a group known as tiger cats, which roam across much of South America. This particular population lives in the Yungas, a mountainous forest region where clouds settle over the trees and the air stays thick with humidity.

A Cat That Fooled the Experts

Tiger cats are what biologists call cryptic species. They look alike. Telling one from another by appearance alone is close to impossible, which is exactly why this discovery took so long.

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz is a National Geographic explorer. She's one of the authors describing the species. While observing the Bolivian cat, she noticed something odd. Its characteristics didn't match the descriptions scientists had been using, most of which were based on Brazilian cats. And that mismatch raised a question she put plainly. What tiger cat do we actually have in Bolivia?

The answer turned out to be none of the known ones. Genetic data confirmed the animal is a separate species. Its fur is light brown with irregularly shaped rosettes scattered across its body, Nogales-Ascarrunz said.

What the DNA Revealed

The team analyzed DNA from 38 cats sampled across several South American countries, including eight museum specimens. The results reshaped the family tree. Tiger cats are not one species, and they are not two. They are five genetically distinct species.

It caught everyone off guard. Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and a co-lead author, said the finding caught everyone off guard, and nobody in the field had ever proposed the Bolivian tiger cat as a different animal, subspecies or otherwise. No one had. They're stunned. And it's a discovery that, according to Lescroart, no one had ever proposed before, not as a different animal, not as a subspecies, not as anything else at all.

"We never expected this Bolivian tiger cat to be a separate species, and no one had ever proposed it as a different animal, subspecies or otherwise."

The genetic analysis suggested the tilcayo lineage split from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. Lescroart explained the logic behind that number. The more differences in their DNA, the longer those lineages are estimated to have been physically separated. In cats, a gap of that size is generally treated as a species-level divide.

Important. The evidence rests on very little. Lescroart was direct about the limits: the information at this moment is limited to two live individuals that were examined, plus a small number of camera-trap records.

Two Cats and a Handful of Photos

One of those two cats is a 10-year-old male. He now lives at the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia after a local family kept him in their home. He is the only known individual of the species living in protective captivity.

Almost everything else about the tilcayo remains a mystery. Its biology and lifestyle are largely unknown. Scat samples contained remains of small rodents, which suggests they may form part of its diet. Camera-trap evidence hints that the cat could be more active at night. That is the full extent of what anyone can say with confidence.

The research team also described a new tiger cat subspecies in Peru's Yungas region. They named it Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, after Antisuyu, the part of the old Inca empire that included the area where it lives.

Why the Red List Needs a Rewrite

The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently treats tiger cats as two vulnerable species with declining populations. That assessment no longer fits the science.

The researchers have shared their findings with the IUCN. Its upcoming review will assess the five lineages separately. And Lescroart said that could produce a more accurate picture of risk, because when you evaluate a species like the tilcayo entirely on its own, apart from the other lineages it's been grouped with, you might see a very different level of threat than the one you'd assume from the combined picture. The tilcayo could turn out to be endangered. They don't know yet.

The Yungas is where it's worst. One of the region's most threatened ecosystems, these mountain forests face growing pressure from deforestation, agricultural expansion, human-caused fires and mining, according to Nogales-Ascarrunz, who says they're squeezed from every side. And she listed the urgent priorities:

• Restoring forest patches damaged by fires
• Protecting remaining native forest
• Maintaining connections between habitats

Eduardo Eizirik is an evolutionary biologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and senior author of the work, and he pointed to a broader lesson. There's still a lot to find. Showing the public that even in a flagship group such as cats there are still new species to be discovered may carry an important message, one that reaches far beyond the lab. Many undiscovered species are out there, he said, and they're at risk of disappearing before we even discover them. And we can't wait.

That is the uncomfortable part of this story. A new cat species identified after more than a century of formal taxonomy was hiding in plain sight, known to the people who shared its forest, invisible to everyone else. Now it has a name. Whether it gets a future depends on decisions being made far from the clouds of the Yungas.