According to ABC News, researchers writing in Current Biology have identified a small wild cat from Bolivia's Yungas cloud forest as an entirely new species: Leopardus tilcayo, the tilcayo cat. It is reportedly the first living feline species scientists have named in more than a century.

The animal is tiny — no more than 3 pounds and about 18 inches long, smaller than a typical house cat.

The route to the discovery is just as striking: ABC News reports that a local family kept one of these spotted "kittens" as a pet for a year before realizing it was a wild animal and turning it over to the Senda Verde Wildlife Sanctuary.

The surprise is that this species was effectively hiding in plain sight. ABC News says "tiger cats" were long treated as one large species and were frequently misclassified as similar-looking cats such as oncillas or margays.

National Geographic Explorer Paola Nogales Ascarrunz, a co-author of the study, told ABC News she noticed the cat's scrunched-up face, small round ears and long whiskers matched no reference photos of known tiger cats.

Her own first encounter undersells it: "The first time I saw it, it was really, really small and skinny and I couldn't believe like how small it was," she said.

The evidence came from DNA rather than looks. According to ABC News, the team compared the whole genetic code of the sanctuary cat with museum specimens of similar cats, identifying the new species plus another new subspecies within the tiger-cat group.

They estimate the tilcayo cat split from a common ancestor of the tiger cats roughly 1.4 million years ago, using the genetics to build an evolutionary tree of how these wild cats relate.

The 10-year-old male at Senda Verde is reportedly the only known individual in protective captivity, though camera traps in the cloud forests are believed to have photographed others.

The tilcayo cat is not alone in being overlooked. The London Evening Standard reports that a new dinosaur, Invictibellatrix amberina, was identified from a partial skull fossil acquired by the Natural History Museum in 1924 and left "overlooked" for more than a century on the Isle of Wight.

Lead author Dr. Cassius Morrison told the paper it is the first megaraptoran found in Europe, a tiger-sized predator around 3 to 4 meters long with 10–20cm claws that lived about 120 million years ago.

"It is a real mystery that this fossil was overlooked for so long, sitting in a drawer for nearly 100 years," Morrison said.

Splitting tiger cats into smaller species carries conservation consequences: ABC News reports that some, now including the tilcayo cat, are considered vulnerable under IUCN criteria, and Nogales Ascarrunz warns the Yungas ecosystem is threatened by deforestation and uncontrolled wildfires.

The worldwide attention she sees as promising for conservation.

The same week, My Modern Met reported that a giant waterlily, Victoria colombiana, was confirmed as a new species after an Instagram post led Kew researchers to Colombia's Inírida region — where only an estimated 30 to 50 plants survive.

Together, the discoveries suggest overlooked species are all around us, waiting to be noticed and protected.