Tilcayo ティルカヨ

The tilcayo is a small wild cat of the Yungas cloud forests on the eastern slopes of the Andes in Bolivia. It was described as a new species in September 2026—reported as the first new living cat species to be recognised since 1923. It belongs to the group of small cats known in English as tiger cats.

It is much smaller and slimmer than a house cat. The light brown to beige coat carries large, irregular, dark brown to black rosettes, mostly open or partly closed. The back is slightly darker along the midline and paler towards the legs. It has short, rounded ears and long whiskers, and a fairly long tail without the broad, complete rings seen in some related species. The sanctuary animal featured in news reports weighs about 1.4 kg (3 lb).

Almost nothing is yet known about its diet, activity patterns or other aspects of its life in the wild. News reports mention small rodents found in its droppings and camera-trap records suggesting it is active at night, but these are preliminary. Surveys of its status in the wild are under way.

So far it has been confirmed only in the Bolivian Yungas. The type specimen came from near the village of Arapata in Nor Yungas Province, La Paz Department, at about 1,570 m. How far its range extends remains to be investigated.

It lives in the montane cloud forest that runs from the eastern slopes of the Andes down towards the Amazon lowlands—humid mountain forest often wrapped in mist.

It belongs to the same family as the house cat, but the two are only distantly related. House cats come from the African wildcat of the domestic cat lineage, whereas the tilcayo belongs to the ocelot lineage, which evolved in the Americas. No cat breed has been created using the tilcayo.

It has not yet been assessed for the IUCN Red List. The tiger cats that were previously assessed together as Leopardus tigrinus are listed as Vulnerable, and the research team points out that each species now needs to be assessed separately. The loss of its forest habitat is a concern, but further surveys are needed to assess its numbers and threats.

It began with a single cat brought to the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia. A local man had found a kitten near the forest, taken it for a domestic cat and raised it for about a year before handing it over. In 2019 the biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz noticed that the size and shape of its rosettes differed from those of tiger cats elsewhere, which led to genetic research. A team including the University of Antwerp in Belgium and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Brazil sequenced the whole genomes of 38 Leopardus cats, including 26 tiger cats (eight from museum specimens). They found that the tiger cats comprise five species—Leopardus tigrinus, L. guttulus, L. pardinoides, L. emiliae and L. tilcayo—and that the tilcayo split from its closest lineage about 1.4 million years ago.