When wildlife photographer Mohammed Almuntasir uploaded 18 seconds of footage to YouTube, he thought little more about the small, pale cat seen digging a hollow in the sand in the remote dunes of south-west Libya.

The video, however, posted in 2017, turned out to be the first material evidence that the sand cat (Felis margarita), the world’s only felid adapted to true desert conditions, existed in the country.

“When I posted it, nobody believed it had been filmed in Libya,” he said. “Everyone denied it, but I kept insisting that the cat is here, in several places; one of them was only 70km (43 miles) from Zintan, where I live.”

Nearly a decade later there is increasing evidence that this was not just one sand cat but that south-western Libya may represent a previously unrecognised stronghold for the species. The sand cat is no bigger than a domestic cat and its sandy colour means it is almost impossible to spot in the terrain it inhabits, earning it the nickname “ghost of the desert”.

Almuntasir did not actively circulate his film of the cat, but it drew attention on its own, prompting numerous researchers to contact him over the years, including Firas Hayder, a zoologist specialising in small carnivores and a postdoctoral researcher at Sol Plaatje University in South Africa.

“He convinced me that we should collaborate on a study to document the return of this animal to Libya and register it among Libyan wildlife species,” Almuntasir says.

Libya’s south-west is one of the least studied terrestrial environments in north Africa and Hayder says he had reviewed every scientific source that mentioned the sand cat in Libya and found that none had produced a single piece of evidence or set of coordinates.

“When I asked Mohammed where he had seen the cat, he told me he had observed it in multiple areas,” Hayder says. “That was what surprised me.”

Ecological hotspots in Libya’s south-west, he explains, have no protected areas, no camera trap infrastructure, no trained field teams and no functioning central authority to coordinate research.

Smuggling networks operating across porous borders with Algeria, Niger and Chad make fieldwork physically dangerous.

“The south-western regions of Libya are active with smuggling networks, so they are not safe,” Almuntasir says. “On one occasion we came under gunfire during one of our trips, which forced us to leave the area quickly.”

After meeting, Hayder and Almuntasir embarked on an eight-year collaboration conducted almost entirely remotely.

“I taught Mohammed the field research methods from South Africa – how to record GPS coordinates, how to document each sighting with photographs or video,” Hayder says. “He applied all of that across the south-western desert, collecting testimony from local Tuareg communities who know the terrain intimately.”

Almuntasir, who grew up in the Nafusa mountains, where residents are deeply familiar with Hamada al Hamra, a vast rocky desert plateau in south-western Libya covering 84,000 sq km, joined local hunters on their expeditions, carrying a camera instead of a rifle.

“They would tell me about places where they had seen the sand cat and record the coordinates, and I would compile them all to plan a dedicated trip to visit each location,” he says.

In some cases, he and his guides followed paw prints for days to locate a burrow, then pitched a tent and waited for the animal to emerge.

Their efforts culminated in a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Arid Environments in February 2026 documenting the sand cat at 13 sites across the Libyan Sahara, as well as the Saharan striped polecat at eight new locations, seven of them outside the species’ recognised IUCN range. A high proportion of of sand cat sightings, 15 out of 36, were concentrated in Wadi Armet, an isolated valley roughly 1,000km south-west of Tripoli.

“This valley is incredibly vast,” Almuntasir says. “More than half of it remains unexplored because of how rugged the terrain is. Animals migrate there in summer because of the water. Many of them come from the Tassili n’Ajjer reserve on the other side of the Algerian border.”

The findings suggest that the species is more widespread and in better condition in Libya than previously believed, and that the country’s south-west may represent a strong refuge for desert-adapted species. The sand cat is one of a number of mammals considered threatened in Libya, including the cheetah, dama gazelle and sand gerbil.

“There has always been a large question mark over Libya because of the scarcity of studies and surveys,” Ibrahim Elkahwage, head of the Libyan Wildlife Trust and the Libyan IUCN committee, tells the Guardian. “This research is an important contribution that could help reveal the enormous biodiversity hidden in the Libyan Sahara.”

But the researchers also documented cases of sand cats being sold as pets in local markets and, in some cases, accidentally killed by hunters.

Because sand cats feed primarily on rodents such as jerboas, as well as venomous snakes and scorpions, they have an important role to play in preventing cascading damage to the limited vegetation that sustains desert ecosystems

“All Libyans should be involved in conservation efforts,” says Hayder. “They need to feel a sense of responsibility, that these species represent their environment and represent their country.”

This story was produced in collaboration with Egab.