About ten years ago, a family in Bolivia found a furry cub in the Yungas and thought the obvious: it was a cat.
They raised it as such. But something didn’t add up. It hunted chickens with a precision no domestic kitten possesses, and its meow sounded different, almost like another language. Eventually, it ended up at the Senda Verde refuge, where someone finally asked the right question.
A team of researchers from Bolivia, Brazil, and Belgium analyzed its genetics and confirmed the unthinkable: it was not a Leopardus tigrinus, the species it had always been mistaken for. It was something new. They named it Leopardus tilcayo, as local inhabitants call it, and the study published in Current Biology confirmed what no zoology book had recorded: the first feline species described in more than 100 years. It measures 45 centimeters and weighs just 1,4 kilos — smaller than many house cats, and yet a piece that science did not know it was missing.