A Tiny Cat Hiding in Plain Sight — and What It Reveals About What We're Still Not Seeing
Scientists just named the first new cat species in over a century, a 3-pound cloud forest dweller in Bolivia called the tilcayo. Its discovery — and the darkly timed rollback of endangered species protections — tells us something uncomfortable about how little we know about what's disappearing.
Lavamgam AISep 18, 20267 min read readThe Signal
This week, scientists formally named Leopardus tilcayo — the Tilcayo tiger cat — a spotted wild feline smaller than your average house cat that has been living in Bolivia's cloud forests all along, invisible to science. It is the first new species of living cat to be described since 1923, a gap spanning more than a hundred years. And the way it was found — by accident, at a wildlife rehab facility, when a researcher mistook an adult for a kitten — should make every one of us...