Newest big cat species

The 'newest' big cat species known to science, the Sunda clouded leopard, has two sub-species, scientists have discovered.
Researchers only realised it was a new species - distinct from clouded leopards living elsewhere in Asia - in 2007.
Now a genetic analysis has confirmed that the cat comes in two forms, one living in Sumatra, the other on Borneo. 
Clouded leopards are the most elusive of the big cats, which include lions, tigers, jaguars, snow leopards and normal spotted leopards. Living across south-east Asia, into China and India, the leopards have larger cloud-like spots than ordinary leopards. 

Captured: Sunda clouded leopard from Borneo taken by an automated camera-trap set up by the Conservation of Carnivores in Tangkulap Forest Reserve on Sabah.

Until 2006, all clouded leopards were thought to belong to a single species. However, genetic studies revealed that there are actually two quite distinct clouded leopard species.

As well as the better known clouded leopard living on the Asian mainland ( Neofelis nebulosa ), scientists determined that a separate clouded leopard species lives on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

This leopard is now known as the Sunda clouded leopard ( Neofelis diardi ), though it was previously and erroneously called the Bornean clouded leopard. The two species are thought to have split over one million years ago. 
Since 2008, it has been listed as vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. 

Elusive: A Sunda clouded leopard from Borneo, a different subspecies from its Indonesian relative

In 2010, a team of scientists working in the Dermakot Forest Reserve in Malaysia released the first footage of the cat in the wild to be made public.

Led by Mr Andreas Wilting of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany, the researchers captured images of a Sunda clouded leopard walking along a road.

Now Mr Wilting and colleagues have published new research which reveals even more about this mysterious cat.

They sampled 15 Sunda clouded leopards living on Borneo and 16 living in Sumatra, conducting molecular and genetic studies to reveal their origin.

The researchers also examined the skulls of 28 further Sunda clouded leopards and the fur coats of 20 specimens held in museums, as well as the coats of cats photographed on both islands.

'Although we suspected that Sunda clouded leopards on Borneo and Sumatra have likely been geographically separated since the last Ice Age, it was not known whether this long isolation had caused them to split up into separate sub-species,' said Wilting.

But his team's analysis confirms that the cat comes in two forms, a Bornean subspecies N. d. borneensis and the Sumatran subspecies N. d. diardi.

Their results are published in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 



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