A ‘Weird Cat’ Found as a Kitten on a Bolivian Road Is the First New Living Cat Species Named in Over a Century
Nature World News | 24.09.2026 04:00
A small spotted cat that spent about a year as a family pet in Bolivia has turned out to be a species new to science, the first new living wild cat species formally named in more than a century. In a peer-reviewed study of tiger cat genomes published in Current Biology on Sept. 17, researchers named it Leopardus tilcayo, keeping the name that communities in Bolivia's Yungas cloud forest already use for the animal. The last new living cat species described before it was the pampas cat, in 1923.
