Family Cat Looked Like a 3-Pound Leopard. It Was a New Wildcat Species.

A family in Bolivia found a tiny spotted kitten near a forest and took it home. They kept it for about a year before realizing something was off.

Quite a bit, as it turns out. The 3-pound cat belonged to a species new to science. It had been more than a century since a new living cat species was formally described.

Leopardus tilcayo, or the tilcayo tiger cat, is the first new living feline species formally described in more than a century. It lives in Bolivia's Yungas cloud forest, where the Andes meet the Amazon basin, and is smaller than the average house cat.

The tilcayo had been hiding in plain sight because it belongs to a group of South American cats that look remarkably similar. Researchers analyzed DNA from 38 cats and found that animals previously lumped together as tiger cats actually represent five genetically distinct species.

The Bolivian cats were the surprise. Their DNA showed that the tilcayo lineage split from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. Nobody had previously proposed that it was a separate species at all.

And science still barely knows this cat. Researchers have examined only two living individuals, plus a small number caught on camera traps. Early evidence suggests it is nocturnal and eats small rodents, but its population, full range and much of its behavior remain unknown.

One of those two cats is now about 10 years old and lives at the Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary. Before that, he was somebody's very unusual house cat.

There are worse ways for a new species to introduce itself.

Read the full story at The Guardian, September 17, 2026

Hot Take: No real surprise that somebody brought it home. This may be the closest anyone gets to watching a wild cat discover, in real time, that humans are extremely easy to domesticate.