A new cat species has been scientifically described 鈥� the diminutive, spotted tilcayo from Bolivia.
Several species of small cat in the Leopardus genus live in South America, including the ocelot, margay, kodkod, Geoffroy鈥檚 cat and the tiger cat or oncilla. The similar appearance of these nocturnal and hard-to-spot cats has made separating them into distinct species difficult.
This is particularly true of tiger cats, which are about the size of a house cat, and are found in Costa Rica in Central America, and across a vast swathe of South America including Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Historically, there have been many local and scientific names for them, but they all got subsumed into a single species, Leopardus tigrinus.
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Genetic studies have since divided the species into four, resurrecting three of the species names that scientists once used before they were all lumped together under the name L. tigrinus. This process saw the official recognition of the in 2013, in 2017 and the in 2024.
Now, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his colleagues have analysed the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, including 26 tiger cats from across their known range.
The genomics revealed a fifth distinct species living in the Bolivian Yungas forests on the east slopes of the Andes mountains. The researchers describe it under a completely new name: Leopardus tilcayo, naming it after the local term used for this cat.
鈥淲e鈥檝e discovered a new species of cat that had not been scientifically named before,鈥� says Eizirik, adding that this is the first time this has happened for a century.
鈥淭here are more cat species. Who can鈥檛 love that?鈥� says at the University of California, Davis. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e hard to find and see, so it鈥檚 not surprising that some of the early taxonomy needs to be modified now we have more data.鈥�
L. tilcayo has a combined head and body length of between about 42 and 50 centimetres and weighs between 1.5 and 2 kilograms. The genomes revealed that it diverged from the lineage containing L. tigrinus and L. pardinoides nearly 1.4 million years ago.
Telling the new species apart visually is not easy. 鈥淭he five tiger cat species are all cryptic species. They鈥檙e morphologically very similar,鈥� says team member at University of Antwerp in Belgium.
The researchers also found that in the Peruvian Yungas forests, on the west side of the Andes, there is a distinct group of cats in the L. tigrinus lineage that they describe as a novel subspecies, L. tigrinus antisuyo.
There are so many barriers in South America that can geographically isolate animal populations from each other, including mountains and rivers, that more cat species may be waiting to be found, says Lyons. 鈥淚t鈥檇 be rather cool if we could find another species out there.鈥�
L. tigrinus is by the IUCN Red List, but the new species and subspecies will have to be evaluated and protected as distinct units, says Eizirik, especially as the forests they live in are shrinking as agriculture expands.
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