A first in 100 years: New cat species discovered in Bolivia is incredibly tiny
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "A first in 100 years: New cat species discovered in Bolivia is incredibly tiny")
(Representative image) Leopardus tilcayo, or the tilcayo tiger cat lives in Bolivia. Photograph: (Wikimedia Commons)
A new cat species has been discovered in a Bolivian sanctuary. The tiny cat has been named Leopardus tilcayo, or the tilcayo tiger cat. It has spots all over and is slender. Scientists say the finding will help with conservation efforts
Scientists have discovered a new cat species for the first time in 100 years. This spotted cat lives in the forests of Bolivia, is quite small, and till now has been confused with other wild cats because of its spots and stripes. Leopardus tilcayo, or the tilcayo tiger cat, is slender and has rounded ears. It lives in the Bolivian Yungas, the point where the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon basin. The discovery was detailed in the journal Current Biology on Thursday.
Interestingly, co-author of the study, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, said that almost every newly discovered species is small in size. "This time, it’s a cat. That’s really novel. And it hasn’t happened in 100 years. No one else had named it. No one else had described it," she said.
"It's an amazing result that we have a new species for the world, which is the Leopardus tilcayo," Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz of Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia, said.
Number of tilcayo tiger cats
The team is not sure how many tilcayo tiger cats live in the wild. "We really don’t know how many cats are still in the wild," he added. For now, they only know about one confirmed living member of the species in a rescue sanctuary in Bolivia. However, they are sure there are more of them.
Researchers carried out DNA studies that confirmed the cat belongs to a whole new class.
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Scientists are hopeful that their discovery will push for efforts to conserve tiger cats, a group of small wild cats found in South and Central America.
Tiny cat looked like a kitten
The 10-year-old cat, nicknamed "Tigrino", was found in a forest by a local who thought it was a domestic kitten. But as it grew up, he noticed that it wasn't a regular house cat. Dr Nogales-Ascarrunz saw the cat at the sanctuary and noticed something unusual about it. It was extremely small, so small that it looked like a kitten, even though it was a fully grown cat. Initially, others thought it might be a known tiger cat species from Brazil.
But Nogales-Ascarrunz knew something was off. So she started investigating the family history of tiger cats along with other researchers. Researchers used DNA from living animals and museum specimens to check what this cat was. The study states there are five tiger cat species in South America.
The team said this would help with conservation efforts, since if you don't know about a species, you cannot protect it. "These are animals similar in size to a domestic cat, so you might think we would know them all by now, but this discovery shows how much biodiversity is still to be uncovered in some of the less-studied regions of the world," Co-researcher Dr Caroline Sartor said.
The finding brings the total number of known tiger cat species to 44 or more.
