Tilcayo Tiger Cat
About a decade ago, a man in Bolivia found a kitten beside a road near the forest and took it home. He fed it noodles, rice and eggs.
The kitten grew up small and spotted, and it didn't act like a pet. It began going after the neighbors' chickens. After about a year, the family decided it was probably wild and brought it to Senda Verde, a wildlife refuge in the Yungas region. Known as Tigrino, the cat still lives there.
On September 17, 2026, scientists described Tigrino's kind as a new species, Leopardus tilcayo, in the journal Current Biology. It is the first new living cat species described since the pampas cat in 1923.
A cat that didn't match
Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a Bolivian biologist who studies the country's wild cats, met Tigrino at the refuge. She first took him for a northern tiger cat, one of a group of small spotted cats that live in South America's forests. But his rosettes were bigger than in the reference photos she compared, and he was unusually small.
Tiger cats look so much alike that spots can't settle the question, so the answer had to come from DNA. Working with Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp and Eduardo Eizirik, a geneticist in southern Brazil, the team compared complete genomes from 38 cats across the genus Leopardus, including museum specimens. Tigrino's lineage, they found, split from its relatives roughly 1.4 million years ago.
New, or just renamed?
Other "new" cats of recent years mostly arrived on paper: a known species split in two, or a subspecies promoted to a species. The tilcayo is different. People in the Yungas knew the cat, but science had never described it, and its DNA matched no species ever sampled.
Even the number of tiger cats is up for debate. The IUCN Red List still treats them as two species. The new study points to five, with the tilcayo as one of them. That matters for conservation: splitting one wide-ranging species into several means each is smaller, and some may need protection of their own.
Small, spotted and mostly a mystery
The tilcayo is smaller than an average house cat: about 18 inches from head to the base of the tail, and around 3 to 4 pounds. Its tawny coat carries big, uneven rosettes. It has short rounded ears, a small, slightly squashed face and long whiskers.
It lives in the Yungas, the steep cloud forests on the eastern slope of the Andes. Almost everything else is unknown. Droppings suggest it eats small rodents, and camera footage hints that it's active at night. Tigrino is the only one known to live in human care, and no one knows how many live in the wild.
Why "tilcayo"?
Tilcayo is what people in the Yungas have long called the little spotted cat, and nobody seems to know what the word means. It isn't Spanish. When researchers asked whether it came from Quechua or Aymara, locals said it was simply what their grandfathers called it. The scientists kept the name as a tribute.
What happens next
The tilcayo's own conservation status hasn't been assessed yet. Until now it was counted among the tiger cats, which the IUCN lists as vulnerable. Its forests are losing ground to clearing, farming, fires and mining, and diseases carried by domestic animals are another threat to cats like it.
The next job is finding the wild ones: where tilcayos live, how many there are and how to protect their forest. For now, Tigrino is still at Senda Verde, the kitten who ate noodles, chased chickens and sat in plain sight for years before science caught up.
You can hear Nogales-Ascarrunz tell the story on Science Friday.
