New Bolivian cat claws its way into species list: What we meow

A new species of wildcat, discovered in Bolivia, has been formally identified after the accidental discovery of a lost kitten and nearly 10 years of painstaking research.

The Leopardus tilcayo, which local people in the Bolivian Yungas, a band of cloud forest which runs along the eastern slope of the Andes, were aware of, was previously thought to be related to other wildcats in the region.

A study published in Current Biology this week has announced the first new cat species to be discovered in more than 100 years. The last was the pampas cat, reported in 1923.

Scientists have named the new cat Leopardus tilcayo, after the local Bolivian name for the animal.

The Leopardus tilcayo has been found living in the Bolivian Yungas, a band of cloud forest which runs along the eastern slope of the Andes, forming a transitional zone between the high mountains and the Amazon basin. This is a rugged, humid and largely under-studied ecoregion, which spreads into Peru and northern Argentina, although so far the tilcayo has only been genetically confirmed in Bolivia.

Researchers don’t yet know whether the species is confined to a single pocket of this forest or spread more widely across it.

Jonas Lescroart, a researcher at the University of Antwerp and coauthor of the study, said such a discovery is rare for the cat family. New species are sometimes “declared” when older scientific names are reinstated after genetic research shows a population was wrongly grouped with another species. That happened with the clouded tiger cat two years ago and the southern tiger cat, Leopardus guttulus, in 2013.

“It had never been given a scientific name, and it had never been formally described in a scientific way that was published,” Lescroart told Al Jazeera. “So we had the honour of coming up with a name for this animal and doing the formal scientific description.”