Science just added a new cat to the family tree.
Locals already had a name for it. Genomics gave science one.
A peer-reviewed study in Current Biology, published September 17, 2026, used phylogenomics and museum specimens to resolve South America's tiger cats into five distinct species. One of them, a small spotted cat from the Yungas cloud forests of Bolivia, is formally described as new to science: Leopardus tilcayo. Reliable reporting describes it as the first newly described living cat species in more than a century.
WHAT HAPPENED
Researchers combined genomic data with museum and field material — an approach the authors call museomics — to untangle a group of small spotted cats that had long been lumped together under a couple of names. The genetics separated them into five species. The Bolivian animal was named Leopardus tilcayo, keeping the word local communities already used for it: tilcayo. So this is not a case of an animal nobody knew existed. People living alongside it knew it perfectly well; what changed is that science now has a name, a boundary and a family tree position for it. Scientists still know very little about how many there are, how far the species ranges, what it eats or how it behaves.
WHY THIS IS HOPESLOP
A species that is invisible on paper is almost impossible to protect. Accurate taxonomy is the unglamorous paperwork conservation runs on: it decides what gets counted, assessed and funded. Naming the tilcayo does not make it safe, and nobody is claiming it is abundant. It does give anyone trying to look after it a real target instead of a blur.
ORIGINAL SOURCECurrent BiologyRead the original report
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