And here I was imagining a diverse group of scientists, because science is rarely done by just one person anyway.

I think the cat ended up in a shelter (I don’t know the reason though) and then they discovered it didn’t match the other cat species known about. So it happened the other way around.

That’s kinda exactly what happened. There were 4 known species. One cat ended up in a shelter that was not exactly like any of those, so they decided to take DNA from 35 cats from the 4 (now 5) species and showed the 5th was a separate species.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2.full

The non-paywalled non-peer reviewed older version of this article.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 So from the abstract of the paper they use two different techniques. Lineage tracing studies in mouse embryos and differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells. Both these techniques are not even decades old at this moment.