Leopardus Tilcayo: First New Wild Cat Named in 100 Years

Scientists have formally described and named a new species of wild cat. Leopardus tilcayo — the tilcayo tiger cat — weighs about 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds) and measures roughly 46 centimeters (18 inches) long, making it one of the smallest wild cats known. Al Jazeera describes its coat as light brown with irregularly shaped rosettes scattered across the body. It lives in Bolivia's Yungas, the humid cloud forest belt where the eastern slopes of the Andes drop into the Amazon basin.

The formal description appeared in the journal Current Biology, reported by NBC News on September 17, 2026 and by Al Jazeera on September 18. Lead author Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a National Geographic Explorer who heads the Programa de Investigación de Félidos Bolivia, first encountered the animal while volunteering at the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary near La Paz. "I saw this cat. It was really, really small, and I couldn't believe how small it was," she told NBC News. The team then compared genetic material from museum specimens and living animals, and found that the tilcayo lineage separated from other tiger cats roughly 1.4 million years ago. "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," co-lead author Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, told Al Jazeera.

That 1.4-million-year gap is the core of the finding. Cats are among the most intensively studied mammal families on the planet — collected, photographed, and sequenced for generations — which is exactly why a genuinely new one is so unusual. According to Nogales-Ascarrunz, nothing like it has happened in a century. "This time, it's a cat. That's really novel. And it hasn't happened in 100 years," she told NBC News. The practical lesson reaches beyond one small predator: if a cat can go unrecognized in a well-travelled corner of Bolivia until 2026, the same is likely true of less charismatic animals in the same forests, and the case for surveying cloud-forest habitat before it is cleared gets stronger.

Several basic questions are still unanswered. The reports do not give a population estimate for Leopardus tilcayo, nor a conservation assessment, and the full extent of its range — whether it is confined to the Bolivian Yungas or reaches into neighbouring countries — has not been established. Those answers will require field surveys and camera-trap work across the region, and formal recognition of the species name by the bodies that maintain mammal taxonomy lists.