New species of cat discovered!

NBC News reports that a new species of cat has been found, New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years, researchers say. This kitty is a type of tiger cat. It's slender, spotted and smaller than a house cat. It lives in the Bolivian cloud forest. 

The newly identified critter, Leopardus tilcayo was found in the Senda Verde animal refuge in Bolivia’s Yungas region. The Bolivian Yungas is a the cloud forest where the Andes mountains meet the Amazon basin. The tilcayo is completely new to human knowledge.

As usual, humans are polluting the situation to death. Tadeu de Oliveira, a co-author of the study and an ecologist at the State University of Maranhão in Brazil said: “All of them are in habitats that are vanishing fast”.  According to DNA analysis, this diverged from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. That’s enough genetic distance to consider it a new species!

Q: Any bets on how long it will take before overpopulated humans force the kitty from the wild into survival in zoos or some other place of refuge?