A tiny jaw fragment recovered from a cave in southern China’s Anhui Province has led paleontologists to identify an entirely new species of wild cat, one that ranks as the smallest member of the family Felidae ever documented in the fossil record. The find comes from Hualongdong Cave, a site already well-known for its archaic human remains, and pushes back what scientists know about the diversity of small cats in prehistoric Asia.
The new species, named Prionailurus kurteni and described in the journal Annales Zoologici Fennici, dates to roughly 300,000 years ago, during the late Middle Pleistocene. Uranium-series dating of the fossil hominin layers where the specimen was found places it between 275,000 and 331,000 years old. The cat lived alongside an archaic human population at the site, as well as giant pandas, tigers, leopards, clouded leopards, and brown bears, making Hualongdong one of the most carnivore-rich fossil localities known from that period in East Asia.
The entire specimen consists of a small mandibular fragment with two teeth preserved: a fourth premolar and a first molar. Despite its size, the piece carries enough distinct features for researchers at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with collaborators from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, to establish it as a previously unknown species.
At its largest dimension, the first molar measures just 6.37 millimeters in length. That places P. kurteni in the same size range as the two smallest living cats on Earth: the rusty-spotted cat (Prionailurus rubiginosus) of South Asia and the black-footed cat (Felis nigripes) of southern Africa.
