Did you know that not all frogs croak? Meet a silent frog from the Ukaguru Mountains of Tanzania.
Have people discovered every species of plant on Earth? Not even close! Scientists estimate that only 10% of all species on the planet have been described, leaving many more species of plants to be discovered. Scientists have not even identified all of the plant…
Earth is a fantastic place. There are so many species of plants, animals, and fungi that we know about. And there are so many more left to discover! Meet some newly discovered and described species: a tapir frog that looks like a real chocolate frog…
Sometimes species go missing … A “missing” animal still knows where it is, of course! But scientists and conservationists may not have seen it for a long time. Sometimes a species is not seen for so long that it is thought to be extinct. Hill’s horsehoe…
Chocolate frogs are an important part of the diet of young wizards and witches at Hogwarts. You can also buy chocolate frogs if you visit a Harry Potter theme park. A team of scientists exploring the peatlands of the Amazon rainforest in Peru found chocolate frogs…
Shrews are some of the smallest mammals on Earth. None of them are bigger than a mouse, and although they resemble mice, they are not rodents. Shrews are insectivores. They spend their lives hunting down insects in underbrush or burrowing for them through the soil. Shrews stay…
Butterflies do all kinds of cool things. They fly, pollinate plants, and slurp nectar out of flowers with tongues as long as their bodies. They also help rediscover plants that have been missing since 1888! Himesh Dilruwan Jayasinghe was chasing a small leopard butterfly (named…
Did you know that the lizards in the Western Ghats mountain region of India do their own stunts? The Western Ghats are called a biodiversity hotspot for species of lizards and amphibians because there are so many endemic species there, meaning species found there and…
Biologist Nilanthi Rajapakse (pictured below) of the Department of Wildlife Conservation in Sri Lanka discovered a new plant species with years of careful observation and field work. Nilanthi Rajapakse. Image courtesy of the Department of Wildlife Conservation. Mongabay writer Malaka Rodrigo explains how Nilanthi Rajapakse discovered…
Scientists in Ecuador have discovered not one, not two, but THREE new species of orchids in the montane rainforests of Ecuador. A team of researchers from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador discovered one of the new species along a roadside. This orchid has a…
A team of scientists went looking for a tiny species of chameleon that is only the size of a golf tee (5.5 cm/2.2 inches long). They were afraid that this chameleon species – Chapman’s pygmy chameleon – might have gone extinct in its home country…