A diminutive wild cat that inhabits Bolivia's cloud forest has been identified as a previously unknown species, marking the first time a new living feline species has been formally named and described in more than a century.
The animal, called tilcayo by local communities, belongs to a group known as tiger cats found across much of South America. It was found in Bolivia's Yungas forest, a mountainous region where forests are often covered by clouds and surrounded by high humidity. It measures about 18in (46cm) long and weighs about 3lb (1.4kg), making it smaller than the average domestic cat.
Researchers used genetic data to confirm that the cat is a new species and gave it the scientific name Leopardus tilcayo, retaining its local name. The study describing it was published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
"Its fur is light brown ... with irregularly shaped rosettes across its body," said Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National Geographic explorer and one of the authors of the study.
Little is yet known about the animal's biology or lifestyle. Remains of small rodents in scat samples suggest they may form part of its diet, while camera-trap evidence indicates it could be more active at night.
Tiger cats are what biologists call cryptic species, meaning they cannot easily be distinguished merely by appearance, said Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and a co-lead author. Tiger cats were previously considered a single species, although genetic studies decades ago suggested there were several.
The team analysed DNA from 38 cats sampled across several South American countries, including eight museum specimens, and concluded that tiger cats are in fact five genetically distinct species.
"We never expected this Bolivian tiger cat to be a separate species, and no one had ever proposed it as a different animal, subspecies or otherwise," Lescroart said. The team looked in the first place because, as Nogales-Ascarrunz put it, "its characteristics did not match the descriptions, most of them based on Brazilian cats".
Genetic analysis suggested that the tilcayo lineage separated from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. "The more differences in their DNA, the longer the time that we estimate those lineages to have been physically separated," Lescroart said, adding that such a gap is generally considered a species-level divide in cats.
The same research also described a new tiger cat subspecies in Peru's Yungas region, named Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo after Antisuyu, the region of the old Inca empire that included the area it inhabits. The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently treats tiger cats as two "vulnerable" species with declining populations, and its upcoming review will assess the five lineages separately.
That matters because the Yungas is under pressure from deforestation, agricultural expansion, fires and mining. "There are many undiscovered species out there in the world, and they are at risk of disappearing before we even discover them," said Eduardo Eizirik of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, the study's senior author.
It is worth being precise about what happened on Thursday. The number of tiger cat species rose from one to five. The number of tiger cats did not change. No animal was born, moved or altered. The forest was not consulted.
This newspaper considers it an efficient piece of conservation. Four species were created at no cost to the habitat, using only existing animals and a journal.
The eight museum specimens are the clearest illustration. Several of them have been in storage for a long time, and for the whole of that period they have been the wrong species. They achieved this without moving.
The conservation bookkeeping now follows. The IUCN has five lineages to assess where it previously had two species. Four of those lineages are a few days old. One of them is 1.4 million years old. They are the same cats.
A 10-year-old male at the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary has therefore spent his entire life as a member of a species that was described on Thursday. He is, by a comfortable margin, its oldest member.