4 ms·
The First New Cat Species Discovered in 100 Years
- autoexec 15d agoIt's Leopardus tilcayo aka 'tilcayo tiger cat' and it's very cute. Wikipedia doesn't have a page dedicated to it yet. Bonus pics: https://www.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SEI_312819149.jpg https://www.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SEI_... https://media.zenfs.com/en/live_science_953/73a4cafd69e9e86312a459e0206a1469.png https://media.zenfs.com/en/live_science_953/73a4cafd69e9e863... https://media.zenfs.com/en/live_science_953/1fea354ba7a8db696e3bc8750e32dca0.jpg https://media.zenfs.com/en/live_science_953/1fea354ba7a8db69... https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/get/maximage/20260917_1789662761-615.jpeg?1789662761 https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/get/maximage/20260917_17896627...
- cromka 15d agoLooks like a house cat, I am betting it's a matter of months before someone starts selling the crossbreds, like they do with Bengal. Also, they're only 3-4 lbs!
- ghaff 14d agoAll the wildcats (which basically include domestic cats) are very closely related based on my understanding. Even the whole box thing is related to a lot of wildcats having a liking for caves.
- jjtheblunt 14d agoeven as a kid we all liked little forts and boxes etc, which is itself interesting. snow caves were awesome; makes me wonder if it's a primeval instinct somehow.
- WalterBright 14d agoAll of a cat's senses and weapons face forward. It makes purfect sense to have its back protected from an attack from behind.
- BeetleB 14d agoLet's see if it (or crossbreeds) can be tamed. This particular one was actually being kept in a house because someone confused it for a "pretty housecat". After a while, the owner realized it didn't want to be tamed and contacted someone for help. Also, it's the only known one in existence. Hard to start a breeding program unless they find more.
- mlmonkey 14d ago> Let's see if it (or crossbreeds) can be tamed. Clearly you are not a cat person ... the question is not if it can be tamed, but how quickly it can tame the humans around it ... ;-)
- shevy-java 14d agoI mean, taming animals is trivial. Look at the lion whisperer. People before that thought that lions are always wild. Some animals are just harder to tame and remain ferocious more than others. But behaviour of animals is adaptable and most animals learn.
- reaperducer 14d agoI mean, taming animals is trivial. FTFA: "The man took the animal home, believing it to be a domestic breed. But after about a year of living with the clearly wild animal, he realized it would be better off at a sanctuary."
- shagie 14d agoThere's a YouTube (and other) channel out there about a guy and his (I use the possessive with caveats) coyote (named Weave). His motto is "Anything can be a pet if you don’t mind getting bit."
- quickthrowman 14d agoI think the lady that got mauled to death in 2018 at the lion preserve that guy works at might disagree with you if she hadn’t been y’know, mauled to death by a lion. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/28/africa/woman-killed-lion-sanctuary-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/28/africa/woman-killed-lion-...
- dotancohen 14d agoI believe that tri-colour house cats are all female. This is a tri-colour male.
- shagie 14d agoSpots are different. The trim-color house cats refers to all calicos... calicos are white spotted tortoiseshell cats. The "is orange or black" is a X linked gene, so you can have XoXb... and then the x chromosome inactivation kicks in and some groups of cells are activated orange and some are activated black. But (not white) spots and variations of color get into things like the Agouti gene ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agouti_coloration_genetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agouti_coloration_genetics ). A tabby cat (black and tan, or orange and darker orange) has no sex linked characteristics. For a deep dive into the genetics of Agouti and how that influences cat fur colors, http://messybeast.com/genetics-agouti-and-corin.htm http://messybeast.com/genetics-agouti-and-corin.htm
- dotancohen 14d agoI very much appreciate the correction, thank you.
- skipkey 13d agoFemale orange tabby cats are less common than males though, for much the same reason. They have to get the orange genes from both parents otherwise they are just calico.
- shagie 13d agoThe same is true of black cats, the other way around. There are fewer orange (or black) female cats because female cats have another option of coloring - tortoise shell (no spots) or calico (with spots). Another way of phrasing it, half of the male cats are orange, the other half are black - female cats have a third option. Side bit - the wiki page for X chromosome inactivation shows a picture of a tortoise shell cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation http://messybeast.com/tricolours.htm http://messybeast.com/tricolours.htm And white spots gets into interesting questions of embryonic cell differentiation http://messybeast.com/bicolours.htm http://messybeast.com/bicolours.htm The "why are there large splotches of color with a calico cat compared to the much more mottled color pattern of a tortoise shell cat?" http://messybeast.com/genetics-index.htm http://messybeast.com/genetics-index.htm has a deep rabbit hole to go down (and that's for domestic cats... http://messybeast.com/wildcats-index.htm http://messybeast.com/wildcats-index.htm for the other cats).
- Induane 14d agoSimilar looking to the KodKod
- lstodd 14d ago3 lb housecat can shred your face so fast that your arms would be late arriving. do not underestimate cats.
- rootusrootus 14d agoMany years ago I met someone who had trained his two housecats to guard the house (I am not sure what that entails). He also had two great big dogs similarly trained. For my safety he would not let any of the animals near me when I visited, but he said the cats scared him more than the dogs did.
- naishoya 14d agoOne might argue that a guard dog may be inherently easier to bribe with a treat, or cower with bluster. A trained attack cat is a far scarier proposition, given the speed, sharpness, and number of 'utility knives' they have at the ready. Also, the dog is likely to bluster and warn you. The cat, not so much. Just go for your face. In my youth I witnessed a smallish adult puma (mountain lion) successfully harvest a nearly adult cow elk while I was hiding. I was also hunting, but focused on a bull elk somewhat further from me. It was astonishing the speed and total quantity of violence that an 80-100lb cat delivered in only a few seconds on nearly 500lbs of prey. The cat had an alomost perfect attack angle, and the combination of slash, grip, puncture, and throttle toppled the cow elk, and it ran out of resistance in very short order. I had not even seen the puma before the attack started, and I expect a trained attack housecat would practically appear out of nowhere - from behind a couch or a curtain or off the top of a refrigerator, and it would become an 'I need stitches' situation too easily. Its probably a good thing that most housecats are pretty much impossible to train beyond 'use a litterbox' and 'stay off the kitchen counters', if even that.
- FpUser 14d agoI have Bengal cat. Absolute love
- Perenti 14d agoI don't think they'll hybridise - Leopardus has 36 Chromosomes, while all other cats have 38.
- cromka 13d agoOh wow, that is certainly something I missed in this story
- xoxxala 14d ago> Wikipedia doesn't have a page dedicated to it yet. Someone has been typing quickly... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilcayo_tiger_cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilcayo_tiger_cat
- ooboe 13d ago"Also found in Whoppers From burger king" Still needs some work!
- glerk 14d agoOh wow, they are really beautiful. I can tell they are perfect killing machines behind the cuteness.
- sscaryterry 14d agoMurder mittens.
- etatester 14d agoI'd love to rub my nose on their belly. I don't care about my ears anyway
- userbinator 14d agoIt's a sign of the times that I'd probably think "AI-generated" if I saw those images without any surrounding context. (Maybe a few years ago, I might've thought "great Photoshop job" instead...)
- sevenzero 13d ago>...and it's very cute Great, so people will find a way to have it as their pet in horrible living conditions.
- petesergeant 13d agoOnly a matter of time at this point until someone breeds a domestic model
- ChrisArchitect 15d agohttps://archive.ph/cgMTM https://archive.ph/cgMTM
- krige 15d agoPositively tiny. Really makes you wonder what else is still out there. Also an amusing disjoint between it being called "tiger" cat but having leopard spots. At least the latin name is more on point.
- coalbin 14d agoSince this cat is Bolivian, they would be jaguar spots, rather than leopard ones. The conquistadors referred to the jaguars as "tigers" - they certainly aren't lions - and that custom stuck around for long enough for this to become a tiger cat!
- caymanjim 14d agoTo add to the confusion, the genus is Leopardus. And leopards and jaguars are both Panthera.
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- bebeirjd848r 14d ago[flagged]
- JohnMakin 14d agoI think you’re confusing species with genetic variation within a species.
- bebeirjd848r 14d agoBull and fox are obviosly different species! Just because you cross bread them does not invalidate their heretiage!
- hmokiguess 14d agoAwwwww pspspspsps kitty kitty ^_^
- YeGoblynQueenne 14d agoWait, "pspspsps"? Where are you from? I thought only Greeks do "pspspsps".
- pezezin 14d agoWe also do it in Spain, I think it is the international cat calling code.
- reaperducer 14d agoMy German grandmother did it, too.
- rafaelvasco 14d agoNo, it's somewhat common here in Brazil too.
- saghm 14d agoI've heard that my whole life in the US. I think my dad taught it to me when I was really young, because he loves cats and our neighbors across the street had some outdoor cats.
- nottorp 14d ago
- s5300 14d ago[dead]
- shevy-java 14d agoI for one welcome our new feline Overlords.
- yegle 14d agoDesperately trying to find a video with the original meowing sound...
- swader999 14d agoThat's a good looking kitty!
- thangalin 14d agoOn a related paw, Leopardus guigna (güiña) in Anticura goes by the cute name of kodkod: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodkod#/media/File:Leopardus_guigna.jpeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodkod#/media/File:Leopardus_g...
- nik282000 14d ago[flagged]
- nephihaha 14d agoThey still have widespread international distribution. Personally I thought the internet would have been a bigger threat to their readership.
- rglover 14d agoBeautiful. Can't believe how mini and colorful.
- MostlyStable 14d agoWow, I expected it to be a DNA based split or something like that, but a genuinely new to science mammal is pretty cool!
- Transformanshen 14d agoIt always surprises me when people discover new animal species. These little kittens look very cute.
- hatthew 14d ago> And they said, ‘I don’t know! My grandpa called it tilcayo, so I call it tilcayo. I'm curious if the locals knew it was distinct from other similar species, e.g. Oncilla/L. tigrinus, or if tilcayo is the locals' name for a broader set of 2+ visually similar species?
- kulahan 14d agoThe wiki article on it says it was known to locals. I think the problem is that they kept describing tilcayo, and everyone who wasn't there but was listening said "Oh that sounds exactly like an oncilla. must be a second name or something."
- hatthew 14d agoYeah that's what I'm curious about. "Known to locals" is very vague, and there are a lot of situations that could fit that description. The situation you mention is probably the most reasonable concrete interpretation, but my guess is that there was a game of telephone from locals -> scientists -> journalists -> wiki, and any nuance we could read into has been lost.
- hatthew 12d agoUpdate: The name tilcayo has been associated with oncilla by a bolivian government survey of fauna: https://repositorio.uasb.edu.bo/items/0e30ad14-971b-4d99-9aa4-f85359222a1b https://repositorio.uasb.edu.bo/items/0e30ad14-971b-4d99-9aa...
- Sparkle-san 14d agoBabe, wake up! New cat just dropped!
- codedump 14d ago[flagged]
- 0x737368 14d agoVery good news that a new species was discovered that's not a microbe or a fungus!
- thaumasiotes 14d ago> when the researchers compared complete genomes from 38 individuals across the Leopardus genus, the results showed that not only was L. tilcayo different from the other tiger cat species, but it had diverged from them around 1.4 million years ago—an evolutionary distance comparable to that between modern lions and extinct cave lions. So around 2.8 million divergence-years. Going by wikipedia, the divergence between lions and cave lions is much less: > Genetic analysis of ancient DNA has revealed that while closely related, it was a distinct species genetically isolated from the modern lion (Panthera leo), with the genetic divergence between the two species estimated at 500,000 to 1 million years ago. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera_spelaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera_spelaea ) Theoretically, that's anywhere from 18% to 71% of the divergence. (The same page also notes that fossils of this species can be about 700,000 years old, which is philosophically interesting in combination with a divergence date of 500,000 years ago.) These are "comparable" in the sense that any two numbers can be compared, but it's not something you would usually say when one of the numbers is 50% larger than the other one. Even less so when it's 400% larger.
- dataflow 14d agoI don't understand how they're different species from others. By what definition of species are they different species, as opposed to (say) subspecies?
- Sharlin 14d ago> A genetic analysis of 38 cats from South and Central America, including 26 individuals in the Leopardus tigrinus species complex, revealed that the tigrinus complex consists of five distinct species, including L. tilcayo, which is believed to have split off from other Leopardus species over 1.4 million years ago.[5] The study incorporated genetic material from previously unsampled tiger cats in the Guianas region, near where L. tigrinus was originally described in 1775. Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Antwerp, and co-lead author of the study called it "the most complete genetic study yet" of tiger cats. -Wikipedia
- dataflow 13d agoThat doesn't answer my question. What definition of species is that using?
- Sharlin 13d agoThe same that they use for the rest of the already known tiger cat species?! This one diverged from its closest relatives 1.3 million years ago. There are other tiger cat species that diverged later than that. Read the paper if you want to know more. You sound like there’s a >epsilon probability you, a random HN reader, found a gotcha in a paper by the experts of the field because you’re so smart that you know that the definition of "species" is sometimes fluid. Great job, I’m sure the authors don’t know that.
- dataflow 13d agoCould you maybe be a little bit more charitable than snarky? "Just read the paper" is not helpful when the paper is like 50 pages. It's not like I know what makes the other cats different species either. Nobody is trying to "gotcha" the researchers here, I'm just trying to understand what makes the cats a different species vs. a subspecies. We all know the definitions are fluid and I've heard of a couple in the past but I've never heard of one that solely looks at DNA divergence, so I'm pretty clueless and trying to learn something here. If you know the answer, this is not the way to share it.
- lofaszvanitt 14d agoIt will turn out to be a domestic cat that crossbred with some wild cat species. :D
- ChildOfChaos 14d agoBe careful, they are evolving, and everyone was worried that AI was taking over.
- hugodan 14d agoThis looks like AI generated
- lhakedal 14d agoA bunch of Pokémon playing cat ladies out there goes «Gotta catch’em all!»
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- ErroneousBosh 13d agoI wonder how many different species of cat are just called "cats" in the local language of wherever they're found? We have just got normal house cats, that we call cats. They're very cuddly and they're great for keeping the mice under control. Somewhere in the forests of deepest Borneo is a civilisation only recently reached by primitive Westerners, who don't know how to make fire and cook food using only sticks and rocks, and who cannot tell the difference between the blackish-blue berries around 15mm that are good to eat and the blueish-black berries around 16mm that are spectacularly poisonous, and only know things like how to make jet aircraft and rifles and the Rolleiflex 2.8FX camera. Wandering around their village, high in the mountains, are cats the size of Galloway bulls, terrifying looking things, teeth the size of cucumbers. "Oh those? Yes, we call those 'cats'. They're very cuddly, and they're great for keeping the feral hogs under control."
- rsynnott 13d agoThat would be a pretty big deal if found. There's only one known domesticated species of cat.
- ErroneousBosh 13d agoThat many? Are you sure?
- Razengan 13d agoThe first good news in 100 years
- RickJWagner 13d agoAbout seemingly nice cats… Anyone remember Pinky the cat? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/in1ANEEba2s https://www.youtube.com/shorts/in1ANEEba2s
- hn_acker 13d agoAny cat species that I was not aware of can be accurately documented as a zero-day "my beloved".
- lemmetellya 13d ago[dead]