The Flat Headed Cat is an adorable, and deeply endangered, wild small cat. While the big cats get most of the attention and people ooh and aah over lions or jaguars, often the many interesting small cats get ignored.
The Flat Headed Cat is a uniquely aquatic cat that lives in swamps and wet forests across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Brunei, though as those swamplands keep getting smaller, we're seeing fewer Flat Headed Cats all the time. Their exact numbers are unknown and due to relatively few studies, many of their habits are unknown as well.
Flat Headed Cats grow to between 13 and 20 inches tall. Coloration varies a bit, they are born nearly grey and take on a reddish, brownish hue when they mature at about a year old. A few have spots.
They've been observed hunting rodents in palm plantations giving us some idea of their diets. Like a raccoon, a Flat Headed Cat will try to wash its food in water before eating it. Dissection of dead specimens have revealed stomachs containing shrimp, fish, and frogs which is fairly unsurprising for a swamp cat, though nobody has observed fishing behavior in the wild. At least one researcher, attempting to study entirely different animals, observed a Flat Headed Cat diving into the water to escape and swimming approx. 25 meters before reaching land, indicating this is a cat that uses water as both food supply and escape from predators.
Adding to the evidence of a piscivorous diet is its teeth.
Yeah, you know that adorable creature in a sci-fi flick that's just sooo cute and then it opens its jaws up and reveals its teeth are massive spikes too big to fit in its body? Flat Headed Cats are literally that.
The main threat to Flat Headed Cats are Caracals. By some unknown sorcerous mechanism, these cats are able to reduce the size of a Flat Headed Cat's ears, and increase their own in the process. Few Flat Headed Cats today have full-sized ears. Scientists do not yet know why Caracals steal Flat Headed Cat's ear size.