In September 2026, scientists described a new species of wild cat living in the cloud forests of Bolivia. It is called the tilcayo, and it is the first new species of living wild cat to be named anywhere in the world in more than a hundred years.
In September 2026, scientists described a new species of wild cat living in the cloud forests of Bolivia. It is called the tilcayo, and it is the first new species of living wild cat to be named anywhere in the world in more than a hundred years.
It is a small animal, roughly the size of a house cat and weighing between one and two kilograms, light brown with large dark rosettes across its coat. It lives in the Yungas, the band of steep, wet forest where the Andes drop down toward the Amazon, and it is almost never seen. Most of what we know about it comes from two captive animals and a handful of camera trap images.
How it was found
The discovery began around 2016, when a family in the hills above Coroico found what they assumed was a lost kitten and handed it in to a wildlife sanctuary on the road out of town. A young Bolivian biologist volunteering there, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, photographed the animal and thought it looked unusual. Ten years of research followed.
The answer came from genetics rather than fieldwork. A team sequenced the full genomes of thirty-eight cats, including samples taken from museum skins collected decades ago, and found that what had long been treated as a single widespread species was in fact five separate ones. The tilcayo had been evolving on its own for around 1.4 million years, and nobody had noticed.
Nogales-Ascarrunz, who now leads Bolivia's felid research programme, is among the scientists who named it. The name itself comes from local people in the Yungas, who have known the animal was there all along.
Why this says something about Bolivia
The Yungas is not remote. It has villages, coffee farms and a busy road, and La Paz is three hours away. A wild cat went unidentified there for a million years.
Bolivia is one of seventeen countries on the world's official megadiverse list, holding somewhere around five percent of all life on the planet. But it has been studied far less than Peru, Ecuador or Brazil, and the result is that new species keep turning up. Between 2015 and 2017, a survey of Madidi National Park recorded 124 species that appear to be new to science. In 2017, a separate survey of the Zongo Valley, close enough to La Paz for a day trip, found twenty more.
For a traveller, that is the appeal. Bolivia's wildlife has not been packaged and photographed to exhaustion. A good deal of it is still being worked out.
What you can actually see
Madidi National Park is the headline. It runs from Amazon lowland at around two hundred metres up to Andean peaks near six thousand, and that climb is why it holds more bird species than most countries do in their entire territory, along with jaguar, puma, spectacled bear, giant otter and several monkey species. Most visitors reach it through the river town of Rurrenabaque.
An hour from Rurrenabaque, the Pampas del Yacuma is the easiest wildlife watching in the country. Pink river dolphins surface alongside the boats, caiman line the banks in numbers that stop being alarming after the first hour, and capybara graze in the open.
In the eastern lowlands, Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco is one of the best jaguar landscapes in South America. Camera trap work there has estimated a population of over a thousand animals.
Out in the Beni savannas is the blue-throated macaw, a bird so rare it was assumed extinct until one was spotted in 1992. Fewer than five hundred remain and they exist nowhere else on earth. Armonia, the Bolivian conservation group, runs a reserve for them that visitors can stay at.
And on the altiplano, above four thousand metres, the high lagoons near the Uyuni salt flats hold three species of flamingo, with vicuna and Andean fox on the plains between them. It is a completely different country in ecological terms, and most people see it without realising there is wildlife there at all.
Can you see a tilcayo
Realistically, no. It is nocturnal, it lives in dense cloud forest, and researchers are still using camera traps to work out where it ranges. Nobody knows how many there are.
The one animal you can see is the male who started the whole story, still living at the sanctuary outside Coroico where he was handed in. It sits three hours from La Paz on the old road to the Yungas, the one now better known for mountain biking, and it makes an easy day trip from the city.
If you want the rest of it, that takes a little more planning. Madidi and the pampas are the natural first trip for anyone who wants to see Bolivian wildlife properly, and both can be built into a wider route that takes in the salt flats and the Andes. We run trips into all of it, and we work with community-owned lodges in Madidi where the money stays with the people whose land it is.
A new species of wild cat turned up three hours from the Bolivian capital this year. That should tell you something about what else is out there.
