A small, spotted cat had been living for years at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia’s Yungas region, taken in by a local family who noticed it was a little unusual but didn’t think much more of it. According to PBS News, that cat has now been confirmed as a wild species new to science, the first one named in more than a century.
The male cat is now about 10 years old. He measures 18 inches from his head to the base of his tail, weighs just 3 pounds, and wears a light brown coat covered in dark, leopard-like spots. That’s smaller than an average house cat.
A Cat Hiding In Plain Sight
Bolivian biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National Geographic explorer and one of the study’s lead authors, told PBS News that a colleague who thought the cat looked unusual invited her to come see it at the sanctuary where she volunteered. What struck her first was his size.
“Knowing other wild cats, it was peculiar,” she said. “He really is tiny.”
So she and her team decided to find out exactly what he was.
What The DNA Revealed
Researchers compared genomes from more than 30 cats collected across places like Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. When fresh samples weren’t available, they turned to bones and skins preserved in museums across the United States and Europe to fill in the gaps, according to PBS News.
The analysis showed the sanctuary cat belonged to a lineage that split off from its relatives around 1.4 million years ago. The last time scientists formally named a new wild cat species was in 1923, with the Uruguayan pampas cat.
The researchers named the new species Leopardus tilcayo, keeping the name already used by communities in the tropical cloud forests of the Andes where the cat lives, rather than naming it after a scientist or explorer.
“It’s our way of honoring their ancestral knowledge and connection to this animal,” Nogales-Ascarrunz said, according to PBS News.
The find also helped answer a bigger question. South America’s tiger cats have long looked so similar that scientists lumped them together as one species. This DNA work pointed to at least five distinct species instead, four already named plus the newly described tilcayo.
“Even in groups that are very well studied, like the cat family, apparently there’s still a diversity that is hidden,” said evolutionary biologist and study co-author Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp, according to PBS News.
What Comes Next
There’s still a lot researchers don’t know. Nogales-Ascarrunz said scientists haven’t figured out how many of these cats exist, and they still need to learn more about the new species’ diet, behavior, and habitat. So far its presence has only been confirmed in Bolivia’s Yungas forests, and its full range remains unknown.
Scientists hope that giving the cat a formal name and species status will help protect the forest it calls home, which faces pressure from deforestation and mining.
“We should make haste in doing these kinds of discoveries, because all of this biodiversity is under pressure, and it’s disappearing as we speak,” Lescroart said, according to PBS News.
For years, this cat was just a curious resident at a sanctuary, cared for without anyone knowing what he really was. Now he has a name tied to the mountains he came from, and a small but real chance that naming him helps protect the forest he still calls home.