“Strange”. New feline was discovered on Bolivian road: What do you know?

Tin the size of (some) cats, but weighs less than one. It looks like “dressing” as a leopard and there are still those who point to it like a big cat – but it is none of these. The new species of feline discovered has similarities with many other animals, but uses its own name: “Leopardus tilcayo”.

This new species, whose discovery was announced this week, is the first identified as new in more than a century.

Although the information is now known, this journey began more than a decade ago, when a Bolivian delivered to an animal center what he thought was a cat, a year after meeting him next to a forest area called Yungas – and which is “glued” to the Andes Mountains and the Amazon region.

National Geographic reports that the man took the animal home, believing it was an ordinary cat. After a year of living with the animal, “clearly wild,” he realized that it was best to give it to those who could take care of it, and in 2016, he took it to specialists. It was then that biologist Paola Nogales Ascarrunz received a call from the sanctuary. Over there, they described the animal as “a strange cat”.

“I took a hundred pictures of him,” he told the National Geographic expert, realizing that when he saw him he realized that this would really be out of the ordinary, since he was too small for the mairoia of cats already aultos, had smaller ears and an unusual pattern.

Ten years ago, the expert thought that this pet belonged to the species “Leopardus tigrinus”, already identified in Central and South America. But in 2019 the researcher realized that the animal she had photographed was not similar to the reference they had, for example, given animals of the same species in Brazil. 

Then the background work continued, having had years and years of research and more researchers involved. Published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the study that gave this novelty was conducted by an international team that includes scientist Eduardo Eizirik of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), in Brazil, researcher Jonas Lescroart, University of Antwerp, Belgium, and Ascarrunz.

Where does the name come from?

National Geographic, where Ascarrunz works, also states that the animal must take the name “Leopardus tilcayo” due to the name by which the population knows it. “We asked the residents: ‘Why is it that you call him ‘tilcayo?’”, he says, ‘or Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is also Bolivian. “And they answered: 'I don't know! My grandfather called him "tilcayo", so I also call him "tilcayo". According to the publication, the name does not appear to have a specific meaning in Spanish or (The name does not appear to have a specific meaning in Spanish or in the Quechua dialect [Quechua, indigenous people].

So far, scientists can claim that this species lives in the forest region of Yungas, Bolivia, and there is still much mystery about what these cats eat or what animals see as prey. The question of how they reproduce and many other aspects of their daily lives remain to be deciphered “There are so many basic things we don’t know about,” Nogales-Ascarrunz says.

Paola Nogales Ascarrunz is installing cameras in Yungas forests to document the species and to know “their distribution, behavior and habitat needs in a region threatened by deforestation and mining”.