For nearly three decades, conservationists feared one of the world’s strangest small cats had slipped quietly out of Thailand’s forests. Now a set of grainy trail cam clips has upended that assumption, confirming that flat-headed cats are not only alive in the country but appear to be raising young in a remote wetland sanctuary. The rediscovery turns a presumed extinction story into a rare conservation reprieve and raises urgent questions about whether Thailand can protect the last fragments of habitat these animals need to survive.
The new footage, captured between 2024 and 2025 and unveiled around Thailand’s annual Wildlife Protection Day, shows the ultra-rare felines padding along muddy tracks and hunting in dark, flooded undergrowth. After a 30 year vanishing act, the images offer the first official record of the species in Thailand since 1995 and confirm that at least one female with a cub is still clinging on in the country’s peat swamp forests.
The trail cameras that rewrote a disappearance
The breakthrough came from a network of motion-triggered cameras set deep inside a wildlife sanctuary in southern Thailand, where biologists had been quietly scanning for signs of elusive carnivores. When the images were finally reviewed, they revealed a stocky, short-legged cat with a long, flattened skull and forward-jutting jaw, unmistakable features of the flat-headed cat, Prionailurus planiceps, that had not been documented in the country for almost 30 years. Researchers had gone into the project expecting to monitor more common predators; instead they found an animal many colleagues had already written off as locally extinct.
Officials with the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, often shortened to DNP, worked with the big cat charity Pant to verify the footage and then announced that the flat-headed cat had been officially recorded in Thailand for the first time since the mid 1990s. That confirmation, highlighted in a detailed Quick Take, marked the end of a 29 year gap in records and immediately shifted the species’ status from “possibly extinct” in the country to precariously surviving.
From “likely extinct” to living, hunting and breeding
Before the cameras rolled, many specialists had resigned themselves to the idea that flat-headed cats had vanished from Thailand’s wild, a view reflected in descriptions of the animal as “Likely Extinct” in the country. That language framed early coverage of the rediscovery, which noted that a cat long thought gone had been Flat Headed Cat on a Trail Camera, instantly overturning years of pessimistic assessments. The same footage showed behavior that went beyond a lone wanderer, including repeated visits to the same muddy paths and clear interest in nearby water channels.
Subsequent analysis of the camera trap data revealed multiple individuals, including a female moving with a cub, which conservationists interpret as strong evidence that the species is breeding in Thailand’s tropical rainforests rather than persisting as a single aging survivor. That conclusion is echoed in a second Quick Take that stresses how rare it is to document reproduction in such a secretive species. For a cat that had been relegated to the margins of field guides, the shift from “likely extinct” to actively raising young is as dramatic as conservation turnarounds get.
A peat swamp stronghold in Princess Sirindhorn’s forest
The rediscovered population is not scattered randomly across the landscape, it is concentrated in the peat swamp forests of Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary, a low-lying mosaic of flooded woodland and blackwater channels in southern Thailand. Reporting on the find notes that flat-headed cats have not gone extinct in Thailand after all, but instead a small population is clinging on in these peat swamps within the protected area named for Princess Sir, a landscape that has so far escaped the most intensive waves of agricultural conversion. The sanctuary’s saturated soils and dense undergrowth make it difficult for people to access, which may have helped shield the cats from hunting and disturbance.
Conservationists describe the animals as Elusive, nocturnal and semiaquatic, traits that fit perfectly with the swampy environment of Princess Sirindhorn’s forests and help explain why they went undetected for so long. A companion report on the same survey effort underscores that these Flat headed cats are using the same peat swamp corridors as other threatened wildlife, turning the sanctuary into a critical refuge for multiple species at once.
One of the world’s rarest wild cats
Globally, flat-headed cats are among the least known small felines, a status captured in descriptions of them as One of the world’s rarest wild felines. They are named for their flattened skulls and low-slung eyes, adaptations that help them peer along the surface of streams as they hunt fish, frogs and crustaceans. Their range stretches patchily across Southeast Asian wetlands, but decades of drainage, pollution and conversion to oil palm have carved that range into isolated pockets.
In Thailand for the past three decades, the species had been treated as “possibly extinct,” a label that reflected the absence of confirmed sightings since 1995 rather than any definitive proof of disappearance. That changed when Researchers finally photographed a rare cat in Thailand that had not been seen in the country for almost 30 years, tying the announcement to Thailand’s annual Wildlife Protection Day to underline its symbolic weight. A separate account of the find emphasizes that this was the first time a flat-headed cat had been caught on camera in Thailand for about 30 years, reinforcing how close the species came to slipping away unnoticed.
How scientists finally found a “possibly extinct” cat
The rediscovery did not happen by chance, it was the result of a coordinated survey by biologists and conservationists who deployed dozens of camera traps across the swamp. One summary notes that these teams recorded both video and photographic evidence of the flat-headed cat, which had been labeled “possibly extinct,” and that the footage will soon be available for the public to watch. That same account highlights that the work was a collaboration between experts in Thailand and the organization Panthera, a partnership that helped secure funding and technical support for the camera network described in a short Jan update that also cites the figure 128 to illustrate the level of public engagement with the footage.
Another detailed overview of the project describes it as Year end good news, noting that camera traps captured flat-headed cats in Thailand after a 29 year absence and crediting researcher Carly Batist for leading the analysis. The country’s own Department of National framed the rediscovery as proof that the species still exists in the wild, a message aimed at both domestic audiences and international donors.
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