Scientists have described a previously unknown species of dead-leaf toad in the Peruvian Andes. The species, which is a master of camouflage, is named Rhinella yunga after the Yungas, the montane forest ecoregion it inhabits. It lives in leaf litter, where it blends in with its cryptic coloration and leaf-like body shape. Until its description […]
Tag: Amazon rainforest
Locally extinct birds in the Amazon slowly flock back to forests when trees regrow
Between 1992 and 2011, a team led by Philip Stouffer of Louisiana State University tracked the movements of birds through fragmented rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon. Using soft nylon stretches called mist nets, they snagged nearly 4,000 birds at the margins between old growth forests and tracts of between old growth rainforest and forest recovering […]
Amazonian students help monitor threatened frog populations
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, amphibians are the most threatened group of animals on Earth: currently around 30 percent of the world’s amphibians are listed as threatened with extinction. However this percentage doesn’t include those species about which too little is known to evaluate (26 percent). Amphibians face many threats but […]
Bird extravaganza: scientists discover 15 new species of birds in the Amazon
From 2000-2009, scientists described on average seven new bird species worldwide every year. Discovering a new bird is one of the least common of any species group, given that birds are highly visible, mobile, and have been scrutinized for centuries by passionate ornithologists and birders. But descriptions this year already blows away the record year […]
Scientists discover two new remarkably-colored lizards in the Peruvian Amazon (photos)
Scientists have discovered two new species of woodlizards from the Peruvian Amazon. Woodlizards, in the genus Enyalioides, are little-known reptiles with only 10 described species found in South and Central America. Described in a new paper in ZooKeys, both new woodlizards were found in Cordillera Azul National Park, the nations third-largest. “These species were discovered […]