NEW CAT DLC DROPS FOR FIRST TIME IN A CENTURY

Nobody had added a new living cat species to the books in more than 100 years. Then a man in Bolivia picked up a kitten on a road near the forest, kept it in his home for about a year, and handed it over to the Senda Verde refuge, which called biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz in 2016 to look at their "weird cat." She figured it was a known tiger cat. The genome disagreed. Meet Leopardus tilcayo, described Thursday in Current Biology. National Geographic measured the captive male at roughly three pounds and about 18 inches of body before the tail, spotted like a leopard that got shrunk in the wash and smaller than whatever is currently shedding on your couch. The DNA says it split off from the rest of the Leopardus crowd around 1.4 million years ago, and the same analysis carved South America's tiger cats into five separate species plus a new Peruvian subspecies. We clocked all of it because one cat at a refuge near La Paz looked slightly off. The researchers named it after tilcayo, the word local people were already using. Even though we found the new species, we don't know much about them, just one known individual in protective captivity, a ten-year-old male the staff call Tigrino, and almost nothing known about how the species actually lives in the wild. Co-author Tadeu de Oliveira says all the tiger cats' habitats are vanishing fast.

Why you should give a shit: It took a full genome and 100 years to prove this cat exists, and the same method should turn up more of them, which is great news right up until you notice we're clearing the forests out from under them first.