What do we have here?
A three-pound wildcat with leopardlike spots from Bolivia who once lived briefly as a house pet isn’t just adorable. He is also, scientists say, the standard-bearer for the first new feline species discovered in a century. The cat himself is named Tigrino, and his species is called tilcayo.
The biologist Paola Nogales Ascarrunz first met Tigrino nearly a decade ago at the Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary in Bolivia. The cat had been kept as a house pet for a year, before the family realized it was a wild animal, ill-suited for domestic life, and brought it to the sanctuary around 2017.
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