As a lost son, Chilean biologists brought him in. For one hundred and thirty years the Stekelbrostkikker was lost. Professor of Plant and Animal Rodolfo Amando Philippi described the animal as a new species in 1902, but after that the frog was never seen again. Expeditions specially set up in 1995, 1996 and 2002 yielded nothing. The animal was known as ‘critically threatened’ and could possibly even be extinct.
Philippi (1808-1904) described many new species during his lives: 3,300 plants, 2,500 molluscs and another 800 insects. He distinguished species based on the smallest details. That rage did not pass the test of time well; Only 1,670 species that he described, most plants, are still valid species. There was a fear that Philippi had also counted itself with the Stekelbrostkikker.
However, meticulous historical research put biologists from the University of Conceptción on the right track to find the animal. They reconstructed the route that collector Phillibert Germain must have traveled in 1893, when he also gathered the frog he later gave to Philippi. New expeditions along this route yielded no fewer than five places where the illustrious frog appears and has probably been sitting all the time. It was striking that the species can vary greatly in appearance, with sometimes and sometimes not a light line in the middle of his back. But unmistakably the spine breast in adult males, which looks like a white bra with spikes.
With pristine populations, the protection status of the animal can be scaled to ‘threatened’, the biologists suggest In their publication about the rediscovery in the leaf ZOOKEYS.