We Are Still Discovering Cats: Meet Leopardus tilcayo, Bolivia’s Newly Described Wild Cat
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Imagine finding a kitten near a road, bringing it home, and eventually realizing that not only is this absolutely not a house cat, but scientists don’t even have the correct species name for what has been living with you. That is essentially how the scientific story of Leopardus tilcayo began. In 2017, Bolivian biologist and National Geographic Explorer Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz received a call from a wildlife sanctuary about what was described to her as a “weird cat.” A local man had reportedly found the animal as a kitten on a road near a forest and initially assumed that it was some unusual type of domestic cat. He took the kitten home, but after roughly a year of living with an increasingly obvious wild animal, he realized that keeping it as a pet probably wasn’t the best arrangement for either of them. The cat was eventually brought to the Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary on the subtropical side of the Bolivian Andes, where Nogales-Ascarrunz went to investigate it herself. She found a tiny feline with a short-looking face, rounded ears, long whiskers, and a coat covered in beautiful dark markings called rosettes. It looked familiar enough to fit somewhere within South America’s collection of small spotted cats, but strange enough that Nogales-Ascarrunz reportedly took around a hundred photographs of the animal during that first encounter.
At the time, however, Nogales-Ascarrunz did not immediately assume that she had stumbled upon an undescribed species. She thought the animal was probably a member of Leopardus tigrinus, one of the small wild felines commonly called tiger cats, oncillas, tigrinas, tigrillos, or little spotted cats. Despite their common name, tiger cats are obviously not tiny versions of actual tigers; they belong to the genus Leopardus, a diverse group of small cats native to the Americas. Historically, scientists believed L. tigrinus occurred across a huge geographic range, which made identifying the Bolivian animal as part of that species a reasonable conclusion. Things became more interesting in 2019 when Nogales-Ascarrunz was preparing educational material about the wild cats of Bolivia and compared her photographs with reference images of tiger cats from neighboring Brazil. Something about the animals did not match. The Bolivian cat appeared to have noticeably larger rosettes than the cats she was comparing it with.
Differences in coat markings alone are not enough to establish a new species, because individuals within the same species can look different from one another, but the discrepancy gave Nogales-Ascarrunz a reason to keep investigating. Sometimes major discoveries begin not with a dramatic expedition into an unexplored wilderness, but with somebody looking at two photographs and thinking, “Wait…that doesn’t look right.”
Answering that question required scientists to go much deeper than spots, ears, or whiskers and investigate the animal’s evolutionary history through its DNA. Nogales-Ascarrunz eventually worked with an international team that included geneticist Eduardo Eizirik of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp.
Their research examined complete genomes from 38 individual cats across the genus Leopardus, allowing the scientists to compare enormous amounts of genetic information rather than relying entirely on visible characteristics. Museum specimens also played an important role in the investigation, demonstrating just how valuable natural-history collections can become decades or even centuries after specimens are collected. Modern techniques can sometimes recover genetic information from preserved animals and use it to answer questions researchers could never have addressed when those specimens originally entered museum collections. When the team reconstructed the relationships among these cats, the Bolivian tilcayo did not simply fall neatly inside the genetic variation expected for another known tiger-cat species. Instead, the genomic evidence supported it as its own distinct evolutionary lineage. The researchers estimate that the lineage leading to Leopardus tilcayo diverged from its closest tiger-cat relatives roughly 1.4 million years ago. DNA had essentially revealed that beneath those familiar-looking spots was an evolutionary history that had remained scientifically hidden.
The researchers proposed the scientific name Leopardus tilcayo, and the choice of “tilcayo” is one of the most interesting pieces of this story. The animal may be newly recognized by modern taxonomy, but that does not mean humans living in the region had never seen or recognized it before. Local people already called the animal tilcayo, a name that appears to have been passed down through generations. Nogales-Ascarrunz has described asking local residents why they used the name, only to receive an answer along the lines of their grandparents calling it tilcayo, so they did too. That detail is an important reminder to be careful with phrases such as “newly discovered species.” Leopardus tilcayo was not an animal that suddenly materialized in 2026, nor was it necessarily unknown to the people who shared its landscape. What is new is the scientific evidence supporting its recognition as a distinct species and its placement on the feline evolutionary tree. The story therefore sits at a fascinating intersection between local ecological knowledge and modern genomic science. People living near these forests already had a word for the animal long before researchers had a genome telling them just how evolutionarily distinctive it was.
The discovery also became much bigger than identifying a single mysterious cat, because researchers were simultaneously untangling the complicated history of the entire tiger-cat group. For generations, animals spread across enormous areas of Central and South America were placed into a relatively small number of species based largely on their appearance and the information available at the time. Genetic research has increasingly shown that this picture was too simple. In 2013, researchers presented evidence that cats grouped under Leopardus tigrinus actually represented more than one distinct species, and subsequent work continued revealing additional divisions. Research published in 2024 further complicated the tiger-cat family tree, and the newest genomic analysis supports recognizing five tiger-cat species. Biologists sometimes describe situations like this as a species complex, where animals look similar enough that they have historically been grouped together even though deeper investigation reveals distinct evolutionary lineages. This is particularly challenging with small wild cats because many are elusive, nocturnal, poorly studied, and frustratingly similar in appearance. Even camera-trap photographs may show researchers that a spotted cat is present without providing enough information to confidently determine which spotted cat they are looking at. Apparently, one of the most effective disguises in nature is simply being a tiny cat wearing roughly the same outfit as your cousins.
Museum specimens further demonstrate how difficult identifying these animals can be and why modern genetic techniques are changing taxonomy. One specimen involved in the broader research had originally been identified as a margay, another beautifully spotted member of the genus Leopardus. Researchers later recognized that it was actually a tiger cat, with characteristics such as the direction of the hairs on its nape helping distinguish it. Misidentifications like this are not evidence that earlier scientists were careless; they demonstrate how genuinely difficult it can be to separate closely related animals using only the information and tools available at the time. DNA now gives researchers another enormous source of evidence to combine with anatomy, geography, behavior, ecology, and museum records. This is also where museomics, the application of genomic techniques to museum specimens, becomes incredibly powerful. A preserved animal sitting quietly in a collection can contain genetic information capable of changing our understanding of an entire group of species. Museums therefore aren't simply warehouses filled with old bones, skins, and jars; their collections can function as biological time capsules. Sometimes the next major wildlife discovery isn't hiding deep inside a rainforest at all—it is sitting in a museum drawer waiting for somebody to ask it a new question.
For all the excitement surrounding Leopardus tilcayo, scientists currently know surprisingly little about what actually happens during the animal’s daily life. The species is known from Bolivia’s Yungas, a biologically rich region stretching along the eastern slopes of the Andes, where mountainous terrain meets humid forests influenced by the nearby Amazon basin. Beyond its habitat and evolutionary relationships, however, many basic aspects of its biology remain uncertain. Researchers still have major questions about exactly what these cats eat, how they reproduce, how large their populations are, how far their distribution extends, and how they interact with predators, prey, and other small cats sharing their environment. Even determining how many tilcayos exist could require years of field surveys, camera trapping, genetic sampling, and cooperation with local communities. This is one of the strange realities of formally describing a species: giving something a scientific name can sometimes reveal just how little we actually know about it. Scientists have established that this animal represents a distinctive branch of the cat family, but we are still near the beginning of understanding what being a tilcayo actually means. In other words, science has finally introduced us, but we definitely haven't reached the “know everything about you” stage of this relationship.
Those unanswered questions are especially important because recognizing multiple species can completely change how scientists think about conservation. Imagine that researchers believe one species of cat occupies an enormous stretch of South America and has populations scattered throughout that entire range. Even if the animal is uncommon in individual locations, its huge geographic distribution might initially make its overall situation appear less concerning. Now imagine genomic research reveals that the supposed single species is actually several species, each occupying only a fraction of that original territory. Suddenly, each individual species could have a much smaller population and a much more restricted range than scientists previously realized. Habitat destruction, roads, agriculture, hunting, disease, or other pressures that seemed relatively localized could therefore threaten a much larger percentage of one species’ total population. That is why taxonomy is more than scientists arguing about Latin names; correctly identifying species can influence how populations are assessed, managed, and protected. Before researchers can fully evaluate the conservation status of L. tilcayo, they will need much better information about its distribution, abundance, ecology, and threats. Discovering that an animal exists as its own species is exciting, but it also creates an immediate responsibility to figure out whether that species is doing okay.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of this story is simply that we are still discovering this level of hidden biodiversity among cats. These aren't microscopic organisms from a deep-sea vent or bacteria living somewhere humans have never sampled; they are mammals with fur, whiskers, paws, and very recognizable cat faces. Humans have lived alongside South America's wild cats for thousands of years, and scientists have collected, photographed, studied, and classified members of Leopardus for generations. Yet genomic technology is revealing evolutionary divisions that appearances alone couldn't reliably show us. Leopardus tilcayo demonstrates why “discovery” doesn't always mean becoming the first human being to lay eyes on an organism. Sometimes discovery means recognizing that an animal people already know represents something evolutionarily different from what science previously assumed. A strange pattern of spots, a photograph from a wildlife sanctuary, genetic information preserved inside museum specimens, and a local name passed from one generation to another all became pieces of the same scientific puzzle. Nearly a decade after Nogales-Ascarrunz first photographed that “weird cat,” those pieces finally came together into a new picture of South America's feline diversity.
So the next time somebody says humans have basically discovered everything already, remember that in 2026 we are still looking at the planet and occasionally realizing, “Wait…that's a whole different cat.” Nature is Lit.
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