Bolivia's 'Tiny Tiger' is First New Cat Discovery in More Than a Century

In 2016, a Bolivian wildlife sanctuary got a call about a "weird cat." A family had found it as a kitten near a forest road and kept it as a pet. When biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz first saw the kitty, she assumed it was just a small, leopard-spotted house cat. She was wrong. 

This week, her team confirmed the animal belongs to a species never before recorded. It's called Leopardus tilcayo. It's the first new cat species identified in more than 100 years.

The tilcayo is named for the term Bolivian locals have long used for it. It weighs about three pounds and measures 18 inches long. It’s smaller than an average house cat, with light brown fur covered in spots. It lives only in Bolivia's Yungas. The Yungas is a cloud forest where the Andes meet the Amazon basin. Almost nothing is known yet about how the cat goes about its daily life there.

Confirming the tilcayo as its own species took years of research. Scientists gathered DNA from 38 tiger cats — a group of small, wild cats found across South America. They included samples from museums gathered decades earlier.   

Comparing the genetic codes revealed that tiger cats split into five genetically distinct species. The tilcayo is one of those species. It had long been assumed that tiger cats belonged to the same few species. The last time a new wild cat species was confirmed this way was in 1923, with the pampas cat. 

The discovery was first reported in the journal Current Biology. It is raising calls to protect the Yungas forest. The Yungas is disappearing as humans expand into it.   

"I like to say that we always think about big discoveries,” Nogales-Ascarrunz told ABC News. "But maybe these new things are just around us. Now with tilcayo, we have one more reason to conserve this beautiful world."

Reflect: If you could discover something completely new to the world, what would you want it to be?

Photo of Leopardus tilcayo from Reuters.