The tilcayo (Leopardus tilcayo) in an animal refuge in La Paz, Bolivia. Image courtesy of Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz
Joel Kontinen
Some
evolutionist say that animal species die all the time. Contrast to this a tiger cat recently found in Bolivia.
The tiger cat is one
of the creatures they describe as Lazarus animals.
Tiger cats,
which are about the size of a house cat are found in Costa Rica in Central
America, and across a vast swathe of South America including Bolivia, Brazil,
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Historically, there have been many local
and scientific names for them, but they all got subsumed into a single species,
Leopardus tigrinus.
Eduardo Eizirik at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio
Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his colleagues have analysed
the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, including 26
tiger cats from across their known range.
L. tilcayo has
a combined head and body length of between about 42 and 50 centimetres and
weighs between 1.5 and 2 kilograms. The genomes revealed that it diverged from
the lineage containing L. tigrinus and L. pardinoides nearly 1.4 million years
ago.
Source:
Chris
Simms 2026
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