Scientists have discovered a brand new species of wild cat in Bolivia — and it’s much smaller than you might expect.
The tiny spotted cat, nicknamed Tigrino, was found living at a wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia’s Yungas region, after being rescued by a local family years ago.
It is the first new wild cat species named by scientists in more than 100 years.
The male cat, now about 10 years old, is smaller than an average house cat.
It measures 46 centimetres from head to tail and weighs just 1.4 kilograms, with a light brown coat marked by dark spots.
“He really is tiny,” said Bolivian biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, one of the scientists who studied the cat.
To work out what kind of cat it was, researchers compared the genes — the genetic instructions inside living things — of more than 30 cats from across South America.
The tests showed the cat’s ancestors split away from other wild cats about 1.4 million years ago, making it its own separate species.
Scientists have named it Leopardus tilcayo, using a name already used by local Andes communities for the animal.
The discovery also helped solve a mystery about South America’s tiger cats, which look so similar that scientists once thought they were all one species. There are now known to be at least five different species.
Researchers still don’t know how many of these new tiny cats exist in the wild, or exactly where else they might live.
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