You can see how someone didn't find them until now
According to a team of researchers from the Universidade Federal do Paraná, we can now add seven new species of miniature frog to our
understanding of our planet.
Following nearly 5 years of exploration in mountainous areas of the southern Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest, a team of researchers has uncovered seven new species of a highly miniaturized, brightly colored frog genus known as Brachycephalus. Each species is remarkably endemic, being restricted to cloud forests in one or a few adjacent mountaintops, thus making them highly vulnerable to extinction, particularly due to shifts in the distribution of cloud forest due to climate change.
The Brachycephalus family of frogs are very well known to naturalists.
The first species of Brachycephalus was described in 1842 by the famous German naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix, yet most species in the genus have been discovered only in the past decade, particularly due to their highly endemic nature and the difficulty in reaching remote montane sites. Over the course of five years of fieldwork, a team of researchers has provided the largest addition to the known diversity of Brachycephalus, with seven new species.
The worries researchers have now is that these small frogs being so endemic (each species usually located on a single mountaintop each), their survival as a species is that much more tenuous. They already live in a
distressed environment and protecting their habitat alone may not be enough to keep their species alive.