First new cat species IDed in a century.

NBC News reports on Bolivia’s tilcayo tiger cat, a creature that looks like a cheetah or an ocelot but is smaller than a domestic cat and, crucially, had never been identified until now:

It’s rare to find a new, relatively large mammal. Unsurprisingly, most newly discovered animal species are small in size, said Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, who co-authored the study and leads a wild cat conservation program called Programa de Investigación de Félidos Bolivia (Bolivian Felid Research and Conservation Program).

“This time, it’s a cat. That’s really novel. And it hasn’t happened in 100 years,” she said. “No one else had named it. No one else had described it.”

The size of the Leopardus tilcayo population is not clear yet.

“We really don’t know how many cats are still in the wild,” said Nogales-Ascarrunz, whose work as a conservationist is funded by National Geographic. “We need science, we need more studies to answer this question, which is actually critical for its conservation.”

…

The cat had been brought in by a man living in a community in the forest near La Paz who had mistaken the cat for a domestic kitten, according to details recorded by the sanctuary. He had fed the animal noodles, rice and eggs, only to realize it was wild and that he could not take care of it. So he brought it to the sanctuary.

Initially, colleagues at the sanctuary thought the animal might be a known tiger cat species from Brazil, but Nogales-Ascarrunz wasn’t convinced.

“If you look at the spots or the tail, they really don’t match,” she said.

Nogales-Ascarrunz did genetic testing, using tissue from the tiger cat and a second animal that also turned up at Senda Verde. The results from those specimens revealed that the two cats were unique and from the same species, which had diverged from other tiger cat lineages about 1.4 million years ago. That’s enough genetic distance to consider it a new species.

Nogales-Ascarrunz said, however, that local communities in Bolivia have been aware of the species’ presence for generations.

“This cat, they call it tilcayo. And when you ask, ‘Does it have some meaning in Quechua or Almyra and other Indigenous languages?’ they say, ‘No, my grandpa told me that’s the tilcayo,’” Nogales-Ascarrunz said. “This is a traditional knowledge that they have in the community. We want to preserve that knowledge and we didn’t want to give it another name.”

—
You can read more about these cute wildcats here, in National Geographic, and here, in Current Biology.