Yet another Hacker News

The first new cat species discovered in 100 years

265 points ohjeez 1 day ago 103 comments

https://archive.ph/cgMTM

autoexec 1 day ago | parent

It'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_...

https://media.zenfs.com/en/live_science_953/73a4cafd69e9e863...

https://media.zenfs.com/en/live_science_953/1fea354ba7a8db69...

https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/get/maximage/20260917_17896627...

cromka 1 day ago | parent

Looks 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 12 hours ago | parent

All 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 12 hours ago | parent

even 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 8 hours ago | parent

All of a cat's senses and weapons face forward. It makes purfect sense to have its back protected from an attack from behind.

BeetleB 12 hours ago | parent

Let'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 12 hours ago | parent

> 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 11 hours ago | parent

I 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 11 hours ago | parent

I 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 7 hours ago | parent

There'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 11 hours ago | parent

I 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-...

sscaryterry 8 hours ago | parent

The only reason my house cat has not murdered me is because he is 4kg, and I'm not. He loves me though.

WalterBright 8 hours ago | parent

My cat always looked at me like "if only you were smaller..."

sscaryterry 8 hours ago | parent

I'd be getting scared when a cat reaches the 20kg threshold. I'm about 90kg, so thats a 4.5x ratio :)

Cats are the perfect killing machines (apart from maybe sharks) :)

WalterBright 8 hours ago | parent

There's a bobcat that lives around here. He's on my porch now and then, and I also see its tracks in the snow.

It doesn't look like it wants to be petted. I stay clear.

jstrieb 4 hours ago | parent

Many people don't know that Craigslist has a "best of" which includes this (relevant) post that makes me laugh every time I read it:

https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/ric/6881185958.html

WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent

Yep, a bobcat. But much smaller than the one around here.

FpUser 6 hours ago | parent

>"I'd be getting scared when a cat reaches the 20kg threshold" - most likely even 10kg cat will shred you before you could blink. They're insanely fast and surprisingly strong for size. Furry explosives they are

fhe 2 hours ago | parent

my cat at its peak weight is about 8kg, and that's the size that i'd get a bit nervous around if i didn't know it's a tame housecat that runs away at sight of a mouse...

anjel 2 hours ago | parent

See also "why you should never put a chimp and a little person in the same room" by Penn Gillette

ghaff 6 hours ago | parent

Cats are not really domesticated. I've heard various terms but semi-domesticated probably serves. They're very adaptable but not pack animals. You're sort of safe with house cats because they're small. You get less safe as the body weight goes up the scale.

gorgoiler 5 hours ago | parent

It’s funny to hear they are not pack animals. I’m sure that is technically the case, especially in the wild, but my house cats definitely cling to me and follow me around like I am their leader. They groom/fight to try to establish a hierarchy below me, and when my partner comes home from work immediately switch allegiance to her, who they clearly see as the dominant mammal in the house.

They don’t go outside (they can’t really, it’s too busy by the road here and they’d decimate the wildlife, but I live with it because ultimately we’re doing them a huge favor by giving them a home, post-rescue) so I am sure that has something to do with it. Perhaps infantilism is keeping them in this pack headspace? But even then my mother’s cat — rural, murderous, tough tabby tom — treats her like a god and the rest of us as an annoyance.

ghaff 4 hours ago | parent

As I wrote, they're adaptable. But there's a difference between true pack animals with an established hierarchy and being solitary but being open to other cats and species. Certainly, some cats are more pack-like (lions) and others are, or are more open to, being largely solitary.

tobyhinloopen 3 hours ago | parent

My main coon is over 10kg and is basically harmless

WalterBright 8 hours ago | parent

A tamed lion ripped the face off of Melanie Griffith.

quickthrowman 6 hours ago | parent

I still need to watch that movie, I feel obligated to see it after so many people suffered so many injuries while filming it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roar_(film)#Injuries_and_set_d...

WalterBright 4 hours ago | parent

I've watched a lot of horror shows that had no effect on me. But this one wasn't a horror show, it was for real. I found it very disturbing. I couldn't believe what I was watching.

olvy0 14 minutes ago | parent

And you'd think Tippi Hedren would have learned not to go around wild, untamed animals after what her character wrnt through in The Birds!

schoen 4 hours ago | parent

I remember seeing a wildcat in a sanctuary in Costa Rica with a similar story (the kittens looked like housecat kittens, so someone adopted them, but the adult cat's behavior was different enough to be really challenging). I've been trying to remember the exact species I saw there (maybe an oncilla?), but apparently there are several kinds of wildcat fairly easily mistaken for housecats as kittens.

I think not all of them categorically refuse to be pets, but they're noticeably more aggressive and less affectionate compared to housecats.

locallost 1 hour ago | parent

What do you mean it's the only one known? It got the name because locals called it that way. Locals will not call things they don't normally see.

Nursie 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah it’s not the only one known.

Unfortunately while people are going wild as if someone found a never-before-seen cat, this is actually more “after genetic analysis we now know that the tiger cats that everyone already knew about in Bolivia are actually a different species to the ones in Brazil”.

But that’s not very exciting so people and news outlets seem to be running with the story as if nobody had ever seen one before.

dotancohen 9 hours ago | parent

I believe that tri-colour house cats are all female. This is a tri-colour male.

shagie 7 hours ago | parent

Spots 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 ). 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

Induane 8 hours ago | parent

Similar looking to the KodKod

lstodd 8 hours ago | parent

3 lb housecat can shred your face so fast that your arms would be late arriving.

do not underestimate cats.

rootusrootus 6 hours ago | parent

Many 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 5 hours ago | parent

One 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.

ChoGGi 5 hours ago | parent

> 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.

My cat is very well trained to have his harness put on, since he knows it means going outside. He'll jump on the stool and give me a "hurry up already" look and a meow if I don't move fast enough.

The first time I put it on was not so... inviting, though it was a great impression of a Tasmanian devil.

lstodd 4 hours ago | parent

train is the wrong approach. you earn respect with them, and then they defend you.

lol moment was when we with a girlfriend playfully fell down on sofa, but the then master-of-house siberian 6kg cat considered that a threat to me.

he jumped ~3m claws open, smashed a desk top lamp, shredded the gfs' top and basically opened up her back before I could stop him.

musicjerm 5 hours ago | parent

As a trail runner in mountain lion country, you’re scaring me . I’ve never seen one in person and I do hope to see one, one day. But not like you’ve described!

jakzurr 3 hours ago | parent

Yeah, do be careful though. This happened maybe 15 miles from where I live, back in 2018:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/two-attacked-by-co...

Getting old now, so walking in the woods alone is something I don't do anymore, even though things are a lot more developed nearby.

naishoya 3 hours ago | parent

My cousin, D. used to work in a National Park and had an international intern worker C. who decided to walk to work every morning through the park. D. had warned her to be cautious of mountain lions in that area. One morning D. was driving to work and saw her walking and not very far behind her a mountain lion making a 'stalk' approach and D. was able to get her attention and direct her attention to the mountain lion. C. hurried to D's car to ride the rest of the way to work and decided to accept the standing offer or a ride to work.

If you choose to trail run in mountain lion country, a bell may scare off bears, but may have the opposite effect for mountain lions. Stay aware, don't wear headphones or zone out on the trail.

I have seen three separate stalk and harvest events, the cow elk was my first and closest. My second was a wild burro colt. The the third was an old javelina (collared peccary). The second was by far the scariest, as the puma actually bit over the mouth and nose of the colt and suffocated it.

Fear is the correct emotion with regards to these wild animals. If you want to see one, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum (really a zoo, in spite of the name) is the best and safest way I know about. I would never willingly try to find one in the wild unless i had a hunting permit for one, and I'm not inclined to do that.

FpUser 6 hours ago | parent

I have Bengal cat. Absolute love

Perenti 30 minutes ago | parent

I don't think they'll hybridise - Leopardus has 36 Chromosomes, while all other cats have 38.

xoxxala 12 hours ago | parent

> Wikipedia doesn't have a page dedicated to it yet.

Someone has been typing quickly...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilcayo_tiger_cat

glerk 9 hours ago | parent

Oh wow, they are really beautiful. I can tell they are perfect killing machines behind the cuteness.

sscaryterry 8 hours ago | parent

Murder mittens.

etatester 2 hours ago | parent

I'd love to rub my nose on their belly. I don't care about my ears anyway

userbinator 7 hours ago | parent

It'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...)

ChrisArchitect 1 day ago | parent

https://archive.ph/cgMTM

krige 1 day ago | parent

Positively 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 19 hours ago | parent

Since 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 12 hours ago | parent

To add to the confusion, the genus is Leopardus. And leopards and jaguars are both Panthera.

hmokiguess 12 hours ago | parent

Awwwww pspspspsps kitty kitty ^_^

YeGoblynQueenne 11 hours ago | parent

Wait, "pspspsps"? Where are you from? I thought only Greeks do "pspspsps".

reaperducer 11 hours ago | parent

My German grandmother did it, too.

rafaelvasco 11 hours ago | parent

No, it's somewhat common here in Brazil too.

saghm 11 hours ago | parent

I'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.

Loughla 7 hours ago | parent

Growing up in the Midwest it was always kitty kitty kitty kitty KITTY with the last one said at the top of your lungs.

No idea why it worked. It's terrifying.

saghm 7 hours ago | parent

Probably worked because the cats grew up with it too!

nottorp 10 hours ago | parent

And Romanians.

Avicebron 10 hours ago | parent

Can confirm that non-greek Americans do this as well.

riffraff 10 hours ago | parent

We do it in Italy too, afair (I'm a bit in doubt if we also do "tch tch tch")

Modified3019 10 hours ago | parent

It’s very common in the USA.

kulahan 7 hours ago | parent

I think it has become common, but I never heard it until a few years ago. Now it's seemingly everywhere. When I was a kid, it was just "Here kitty kitty" or making a clicking noise with your tongue or something.

rootusrootus 6 hours ago | parent

> making a clicking noise with your tongue or something

I still do that today, and it works better than pspspspsps. When I was young, if my cat was outside on the porch I could click my tongue and he'd come running from a half block away. What a good kitty he was.

pezezin 9 hours ago | parent

We also do it in Spain, I think it is the international cat calling code.

Induane 8 hours ago | parent

We do it in America

astura 8 hours ago | parent

pspspsps is biological , it's common noise to get a cats attention (in many places) because it stimulates their prey drive.

WalterBright 8 hours ago | parent

I'm from America, and we do spspspsp.

msephton 5 hours ago | parent

We do it on the United Kingdom

YeGoblynQueenne 1 hour ago | parent

Where in the UK? I've lived in the UK, in the Southeast, for 21 years and I never heard anyone say "pspsps".

I mean I don't doubt you, I just thought Brits just say "here kitty kitty" because that's what I usually see in movies and TV shows and so on.

It's funny what you miss when you're not embedded in the culture of a place since birth...

nephihaha 8 minutes ago | parent

It's common. But I tend to find people in the south east of England barely talk to one another. :)

bigiain 5 hours ago | parent

Australia also uses pspspsps - at least my part of it and my family and friends.

(and for some Australians some of the time, "ps ps fuckin ps, ya cunting cat!" of course. ;- ) )

YeGoblynQueenne 1 hour ago | parent

"Cunting"! Not just "cunt" but "cunting"! I learned so much from this thread! :D

ChoGGi 5 hours ago | parent

That's a worldwide thing, as well as other stupid human noises ;)

Tch tch tch

MadrasTh0rn 4 hours ago | parent

All of the US and some of Canada does pspspsps

Tiktaalik 3 hours ago | parent

wait where in Canada do they don't do pspspsps?

(is there a francophone different one?)

YeGoblynQueenne 1 hour ago | parent

Well it seems everyone uses that! Thanks guys, I had no idea and this is so interesting to know. Now I wonder if someone has made some kind of study about it. I'll go looking.

shagie 7 hours ago | parent

A fun book is Bad Magic by Stephan Zielinski. Kind of an awkward one to find since it's a common title from a while back (2004) at the very start of urban fantasy... and the author didn't appear to have written anything else.

At one point in the book, several of the characters are in South America looking for a jaguar. They ask the synesthetic mage of their group (each character has a different magical background)...

    “Got anything to call a jaguar?”
    Rider purses his lips. “Well … there is one incantation. But I’m not sure it’ll work. Even the most skilled thaumaturges can’t pull it off more than a quarter of the time.”
    Sturgeon shrugs. “May as well try it, Al.”
    Rider nods. “Okay. Be quiet, everybody.” He rolls his head on his neck, holds up his arms. Takes several deep breaths. Opens his mouth. Intones, “Here, kitty kitty kitty … here, kitty…”
    Chloe throws a clot of mud in his face as Rider dissolves into whoops of laughter. Everybody shakes their heads in disgust and they troop off into the green.

shevy-java 11 hours ago | parent

I for one welcome our new feline Overlords.

yegle 11 hours ago | parent

Desperately trying to find a video with the original meowing sound...

swader999 11 hours ago | parent

That's a good looking kitty!

thangalin 11 hours ago | parent

On a related paw, Leopardus guigna (güiña) in Anticura goes by the cute name of kodkod:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodkod#/media/File:Leopardus_g...

nik282000 10 hours ago | parent

[flagged]

rglover 10 hours ago | parent

Beautiful. Can't believe how mini and colorful.

MostlyStable 10 hours ago | parent

Wow, I expected it to be a DNA based split or something like that, but a genuinely new to science mammal is pretty cool!

Transformanshen 9 hours ago | parent

It always surprises me when people discover new animal species. These little kittens look very cute.

hatthew 8 hours ago | parent

> 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 7 hours ago | parent

The 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 4 hours ago | parent

Yeah 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.

Sparkle-san 6 hours ago | parent

Babe, wake up! New cat just dropped!

0x737368 5 hours ago | parent

Very good news that a new species was discovered that's not a microbe or a fungus!

thaumasiotes 3 hours ago | parent

> 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 )

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 3 hours ago | parent

I 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 38 minutes ago | parent

> 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

lofaszvanitt 2 hours ago | parent

It will turn out to be a domestic cat that crossbred with some wild cat species. :D

ChildOfChaos 56 minutes ago | parent

Be careful, they are evolving, and everyone was worried that AI was taking over.

hugodan 36 minutes ago | parent

This looks like AI generated