A new wild cat species has been identified for the first time in over 100 years.
In 2017, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a Bolivian biologist, got a call about a weird cat that a local man had taken home. The man had raised it as a pet for a year before realising this was no house cat. Nine years, one genome study and a lot of confused Brazilian guidebooks later, that cat now has a name, Leopardus tilcayo: the world’s first new feline species since 1923.
The reason it’s been so long is because the tilcayo was long assumed to be a tigrina, a small spotted cat described in 1775, and presumed to roam the whole continent.
However genome comparisons found the tilcayo split from its relatives around 1.4 million years ago, roughly the same evolutionary gap as the one between lions and extinct cave lions.
Why does splitting a species matter for saving it? Because conservation status runs on head counts. “If you think it’s a single animal from southern Brazil all the way to Costa Rica, you’re going to find it’s not endangered,” sa
... show moreA new wild cat species has been identified for the first time in over 100 years.
In 2017, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a Bolivian biologist, got a call about a weird cat that a local man had taken home. The man had raised it as a pet for a year before realising this was no house cat. Nine years, one genome study and a lot of confused Brazilian guidebooks later, that cat now has a name, Leopardus tilcayo: the world’s first new feline species since 1923.
The reason it’s been so long is because the tilcayo was long assumed to be a tigrina, a small spotted cat described in 1775, and presumed to roam the whole continent.
However genome comparisons found the tilcayo split from its relatives around 1.4 million years ago, roughly the same evolutionary gap as the one between lions and extinct cave lions.
Why does splitting a species matter for saving it? Because conservation status runs on head counts. “If you think it’s a single animal from southern Brazil all the way to Costa Rica, you’re going to find it’s not endangered,” says geneticist Eduardo Eizirik. “But if we find that it’s not a single thing, but actually five things, each of them must be assessed separately.” #wildlife #cats #endangeredspecies #Nature #world
yahoo.com/news/science/article…
A small, spotted tiger cat from Bolivia may just be the beginning of a wave of new small cat species.
Jason Bittel (Yahoo News)
