This Tiny Wildcat Was Mistaken for a House Cat and Turned Out to Be the First New Cat Species in More Than 100 Years

DNA revealed that a housecat-sized feline had been hiding in plain sight.

For years, Tigrino looked like an unusually small version of a cat scientists thought they already knew.

A spotted wildcat had spent about a year in a Bolivian home after a family mistook him for a domestic kitten. By around 2017, it had become obvious that he was no house cat at all, and he ended up at the Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary in the forested foothills northeast of La Paz.

When Bolivian biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz encountered the unusually small wildcat, affectionately named Tigrino, one thing immediately bothered her.

“I couldn’t believe how small it was,” Nogales-Ascarrunz told The New York Times. “I thought that this must be a young cat, or maybe a kitten.”

But Tigrino was already fully grown.

Now Tigrino has become the unlikely face of Leopardus tilcayo, a wildcat species previously unknown to science. An international team of researchers used whole genomes from 38 members of the South American cat genus Leopardus and found that the animals collectively called tiger cats actually comprise five species, including the newly named tilcayo from Bolivia’s Yungas cloud forests.

“The tilcayo is the first living cat species to be discovered and newly named in over a century,” lead author Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Antwerp, told Gizmodo.

A Cat That Did Not Quite Fit

Tiger cats are miniature, leopard-spotted relatives of ocelots. Despite their name, they have nothing to do with tigers. They are notoriously difficult to tell apart. Differences in fur, proportions and markings can be subtle enough that even experts have confused species — and sometimes confused tiger cats with margays, another small wild cat.

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Nogales-Ascarrunz began looking harder at Tigrino in 2019 while preparing a guide to Bolivia’s wildcats. Compared with reference images of the northern tiger cat, Leopardus tigrinus, he was smaller and carried larger, more irregular spots. So, the scientists suspect that perhaps Tigrino’s species wasn’t properly identified.

To get to the bottom of things, the researcher turned to genetics.

The DNA of tiger cats

The researchers combined DNA from living animals with DNA recovered from museum specimens, including six cats collected in the Guianas. The century-spanning collections supplied the first genetic data from the region where L. tigrinus was originally defined, allowing the team to compare the Bolivian animals against the group’s taxonomic anchor.

The tilcayo formed its own deep branch of the family tree. The researchers estimate that its ancestors split from their closest tiger-cat relatives about 1.43 million years ago. Its genome even preserves evidence of ancient interbreeding with the lineage now found in Peru.

Adult tilcayos measure roughly 42.5 to 50.5 centimeters (around 16-19 in) from head to body, with another 25 to 26.5 centimeters of tail. Their light-brown coats carry large, irregular dark rosettes, and their tails are fuller than those of some close relatives. The name tilcayo is the traditional name used for the animal in the Bolivian Yungas.

Previously, a 2013 genetic study had already shown that tiger cats may be much more genetically distinct than thought, helping establish the southern tiger cat, L. guttulus, as distinct. Later whole-genome work in 2023 exposed an unusually tangled evolutionary history shaped by ancient hybridization. And a large 2024 ecological and morphological analysis supported the clouded tiger cat, L. pardinoides, as a separate species.

The new genomes sharpen that picture again. They support L. guttulus, L. emiliae, L. pardinoides, L. tigrinus and now L. tilcayo as five species. A distinct Peruvian lineage becomes a newly described subspecies, L. tigrinus antisuyo.

The Hard Part Begins Now

There’s more to naming a species than mere biological bookkeeping. For conservation, it can change the problem entirely.

“If one supposedly widespread species is actually several more restricted lineages, each may have a much smaller geographic range,” Samantha Zwicker, an ecologist who was not involved in the research, told The New York Times.

That concern is especially acute for the tilcayo. Scientists have examined only two living individuals and a handful of camera-trap records. They do not yet know its total population, its complete range or much about its reproduction and behavior. Researchers think the wild cat is largely nocturnal, and rodent remains in scat hint at part of its diet.

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For now, Tigrino remains the only known tilcayo living in protective captivity. Somewhere beyond his enclosure, in the steep, wet forests of the Bolivian Yungas, others almost certainly remain unseen.

“It’s amazing that there are still new species waiting to be discovered,” Nogales-Ascarrunz told the BBC. “We don’t have to go to a volcano, an island, or deep into the sea.”

Tigrino’s newly identified species was described in the journal Current Biology.