Genetic study splits South America's tiger cats into five species, naming one entirely new

A three-pound spotted cat that spent a decade at a wildlife refuge outside La Paz, Bolivia, mistaken for an unusually small housecat, has been formally identified as a new species — the first living member of the cat family to be described by science in more than 100 years.

Researchers led by biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz and evolutionary biologist Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp named the animal Leopardus tilcayo, after the word Bolivian villagers already used for it, in a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. The paper does more than add one name to the mammal list: it resolves a decades-long dispute over how many species hide inside what biologists have long lumped together as "tiger cats," small spotted felines scattered from Costa Rica to Argentina.

What the genomes showed

The team sequenced and compared complete genomes from 38 cats collected across eight countries — Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Suriname, Guyana and Venezuela — including DNA extracted from eight decades-old museum specimens. That data set let the researchers trace, branch by branch, how tiger cat lineages split apart over the past several million years.

The conclusion: the tiger cat complex is not one species, or even two, but five. Four had already been proposed by earlier, more limited genetic studies — the northern tiger cat, the southern tiger cat, the eastern tiger cat and the clouded tiger cat — and the new genome-wide analysis confirmed all four as distinct. The fifth, L. tilcayo, had never been proposed at all. The study also identified a previously unrecognized subspecies living in Peru, named L. tigrinus antisuyo.

L. tilcayo diverged from its nearest tiger cat relatives roughly 1.4 million years ago, according to the genetic dating in the paper. Adults weigh three to four pounds and measure up to 20 inches from nose to tail base, with the tail adding another 10 inches — smaller, in other words, than an average housecat. It is the first living cat species named since the Uruguayan pampas cat was described in 1923, more than a century ago.

A decade-long case of mistaken identity

Tiger cats have confused naturalists since a French Guiana specimen was first described in 1775. Because the animals look nearly identical to one another, distinguishable mainly through genetics or subtle differences in coat markings, 20th-century taxonomists eventually folded every population into a single species, Leopardus tigrinus. That consensus began unraveling only in the last dozen years, as cheaper genome sequencing allowed researchers to test it directly: a 2013 study split the group into northern and southern tiger cats, a 2017 paper proposed the eastern tiger cat as distinct, and a 2024 study carved out the clouded tiger cat. What was missing, until now, was a large enough genetic sample to settle the status of the Bolivian and Peruvian populations at the edges of that range.

The Bolivian branch of that puzzle began in 2016, when staff at the Senda Verde wildlife refuge near La Paz called in Nogales-Ascarrunz, then compiling a survey of Bolivian wild cats, to look at an animal a local family had brought in after finding it as a kitten and feeding it noodles, rice and eggs. She told Live Science that it "didn't look like the other" tiger cats she had catalogued, though at the time nobody suspected it represented an entirely new species. The male cat, now about 10 years old and nicknamed Tigrino, still lives at the refuge and became the formal type specimen — the individual against which the rest of the species will be defined — once its genome was sequenced and compared against the wider dataset.

Why a name change matters for conservation

Splitting one presumed species into five is not a matter of paperwork. Every tiger cat population previously sheltered under the single "northern tiger cat" label is currently listed as vulnerable, with a decreasing population trend, by the IUCN Red List; the newly split-off southern tiger cat carries the same vulnerable designation under its own separate assessment. Conservation status is normally assigned per species, using range size and population trends specific to that species. Once a broadly distributed "vulnerable" population is divided into five narrower ones, each with a smaller range and, presumably, fewer individuals, some of those slices could easily qualify for a more urgent category.

"Species that are currently considered 'vulnerable' under the single label of 'northern tiger cat' may increase to 'endangered' when assessed on their own," said Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Antwerp and a co-author of the study. "This discovery is definitely expected to increase conservation attention — or, we hope so."

All five tiger cat species face broadly similar pressures: deforestation across their range, capture for the illegal pet and pelt trade, and diseases such as feline distemper transmitted by domestic dogs that roam into forest habitat. L. tilcayo's known range, the Yungas cloud forest where the Andes descend into the Amazon basin, is itself under pressure from logging and coca cultivation, though researchers say they do not yet have enough data to estimate how many of the cats survive in the wild or how large their range actually is.

Fabio Oliveira do Nascimento, a taxonomist at the Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo who was not involved in the study, described the tiger cat family tree to Live Science as having been "highly contentious and poorly understood," adding that the new genomic work has begun "resolving long-standing questions while raising new ones." Tadeu de Oliveira, a co-author at the State University of Maranhão in Brazil, noted that scarce museum holdings had long hampered the work: researchers, he said, simply "didn't have specimens" from some of the relevant populations until recent fieldwork and archival digging filled the gaps.

What comes next

For now, everything scientists know about Leopardus tilcayo in the wild rests on a single photographed individual and the captive cat at Senda Verde. Nogales-Ascarrunz said the immediate priority is basic natural history that most species already have on record: diet, home range, population size and how widely the species is actually distributed through the Yungas. Researchers plan to deploy camera traps through the forest in hopes of documenting additional animals and gathering the population data that conservation agencies would need to act on the new classification.

Conservation groups, including the specialists who compile the IUCN Red List, are expected to eventually reassess each of the five newly delineated tiger cat species on its own terms, a process that depends on exactly the kind of field data the Bolivian and Brazilian teams are now trying to collect. No timeline for that reassessment has been announced. Until it happens, L. tilcayo holds an unusual scientific status: a species with a name, a place on the evolutionary tree dating back 1.4 million years, and almost nothing else known about how it actually lives.