Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz helped identify a Bolivian cat as a new cat species, Leopardus tilcayo, in a study published in Current Biology. The find adds a rare new member to Leopardus after more than 100 years without a new felid species.
Nogales-Ascarrunz said, "I took a hundred pictures of it" after visiting the cat at Senda Verde in Bolivia. She also said, "I was so fascinated."
Bolivia’s Senda Verde cat
The investigation began in 2016, when Nogales-Ascarrunz received a call from a local wildlife sanctuary about a weird cat. A local man had found the animal as a kitten on a road near a forest and took it home thinking it was a domestic breed. After about a year, the man decided the animal would be better off at a sanctuary, and Nogales-Ascarrunz later examined it at Senda Verde on the subtropical flank of the Bolivian Andes.
In 2019, while preparing a booklet about Bolivia’s cat species, Nogales-Ascarrunz compared the cat she had photographed with a guidebook reference photo from Brazil and said, "This is so wrong," as the animal’s large rosettes and face did not match what she expected. The researchers proposed the name Leopardus tilcayo for the cat, and scientists can place it in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion on the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains.
Leopardus tigrinus compared
The cat had long been assumed to be Leopardus tigrinus, a name tied to a 1775 description based on a single illustration of an animal seen in French Guiana. The new study says the Bolivia cat was sitting in the wrong place on that branch of the cat family tree: genetic analysis gave it a distinct position rather than folding it into Leopardus tigrinus.
That shift changes the basic inventory of Leopardus in Central and South America. It also leaves the species’ diet, predators, and reproduction as open biology questions scientists still need to answer, along with whether similar cats may be hiding in other parts of Bolivia’s forests.
Current Biology and future study
Eduardo Eizirik of Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp were part of the work behind the new species identification. The name tilcayo came from local usage: Nogales-Ascarrunz said, "We asked the local people, ‘Why do you call it tilcayo?’" and "And they said, ‘I don’t know! My grandpa called it tilcayo, so I call it tilcayo.”"
For scientists studying Bolivia’s cats, the next step is not another naming exercise but basic natural history: what Leopardus tilcayo eats, what hunts it, and how it reproduces. Those answers will determine how completely Bolivia’s newest felid can be understood in the field.
