New species discovered in Bolivia is first cat described in more than 100 years

A wild cat that spent its first year of life in a Bolivian home, mistaken for a domestic kitten, is the first new living felid species formally described in more than 100 years. Researchers have named it Leopardus tilcayo.¹

The findings were published in Current Biology on September 17 by an international team led by Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp, Belgium; Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, founder of the Bolivian Felids Research Program; and Eduardo Eizirik of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.¹ The study's authors describe it as the first discovery of a novel cat species in more than a century.¹ According to National Geographic, the last one before it was the pampas cat, in 1923.²

The tilcayo is a small tiger cat. The authors report a head-body length of about 42.5 to 50.5 cm (roughly 17-20 in), and it has relatively large, irregular dark rosettes on a light brown coat.¹ The male at the center of the discovery weighs about 3 lb, making him smaller than the average domestic cat.²

From "a weird cat" to a new species

The story began in 2017. According to National Geographic, a man found a kitten on a road near a forest and took it home, thinking it was a domestic cat. About a year later, he realized the animal was wild and handed it over to the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary, on the subtropical eastern slope of the Bolivian Andes. Staff there called Nogales-Ascarrunz about what they described as "a weird cat."²

Nogales-Ascarrunz first assumed the animal was Leopardus tigrinus, a tiger cat species then thought to range across much of Central and South America, Bolivia included. In 2019, while putting together a booklet on Bolivia's cats, she noticed that her photographs didn't match a reference image of a tiger cat from neighboring Brazil. The Bolivian cat's rosettes were much larger.²

"I took a hundred pictures of it," Nogales-Ascarrunz told National Geographic. "I was so fascinated."²

It took several more years, and new genomic tools, to confirm her suspicion. The research team compared complete genomes from 38 individuals across the Leopardus genus, 26 of them from the tiger cat complex. Eight genomes came from museum specimens, which allowed the first genetic assessment of the region where the original tiger cat was described, in the Guiana Shield.¹ The analysis showed the Bolivian cat split from its closest tiger cat relatives nearly 1.4 million years ago.¹

The name comes from the word local people in the Bolivian Yungas use for the animal.¹ When Nogales-Ascarrunz asked why they called it tilcayo, she told National Geographic, she got a simple answer: "My grandpa called it tilcayo, so I call it tilcayo."²

One species becomes 5

The paper does more than add a single species. It finds that the tiger cats, once considered a single species, comprise 5 distinct species, including L tilcayo, and describes a new subspecies, Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, from Peru's Yungas forests.¹

Eizirik told National Geographic that his group has spent about 25 years working through the genus. "What we once thought to be a single species, we've started to see that it was actually a species complex," he said.²

The tiger cats can be difficult to distinguish from one another, even for specialists. They're rarely seen, and trail camera photos often aren't enough to separate one species from another. National Geographic notes that one museum specimen in the study was first labeled a margay and was only later identified as a tiger cat, based on which way the hair on its nape grew.²

James Sanderson, founder and director of the Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation and a member of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group, was not involved in the study. He told National Geographic by email that the results "profoundly change how small cat specialists group small cat species in genus Leopardus." He added that the data hint the margay could actually be 4 species, not 1.² Eizirik was more cautious. According to National Geographic, he said a dedicated study of margay genetics would be needed before making that claim.²

Why the split matters for conservation

A species' conservation status depends partly on how large its range is, so splitting one widespread species into several smaller ones can change the picture a lot.

"If you think [the tiger cat] is a single thing from southern Brazil all the way to Costa Rica, you're going to find it's not endangered," Eizirik told National Geographic. "But if we find that it's not a single thing, but actually five things, each of them must be assessed separately."²

Scientists don't yet know how many tilcayos live in the wild, and little is known about the species' biology.²

For Nogales-Ascarrunz, the discovery is a reminder of how much is left to discover. "Even in the cats, there are things out there that are undescribed, things that people haven't found yet," she told National Geographic. "So let's go out and find them and protect them."²

References

1. Lescroart J, Nogales-Ascarrunz P, Cassatt-Johnstone M, et al. Phylogenomics and museomics reveal five distinct species of tiger cats in South America. Curr Biol. Published online September 17, 2026. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2026.08.059

2. Bittel J. Meet the first new cat species discovered in 100 years. National Geographic. September 17, 2026. Accessed September 25, 2026. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/meet-the-first-new-cat-species-discovered-in-100-years