New eye-catching 'metallic' species discovered in the wilds of the Amazon

As the world’s largest tropical rainforest, the Amazon is home to a staggering 3 million species.

And a team of researchers just published their discovery of one more.

In 2023, Evan Koch — a postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of the Czech Republic — led a team through the Juruá River basin forests of Brazil on an expedition.
In their travels, they stumbled across a new species of Ranitomeya (a genus of poison dart frogs) that they dubbed “an Amazonian hidden gem.”
The color of the amphibian was so striking that the researchers decided to name it Ranitomeya aquamarina.
“The specific epithet ‘aquamarina’ is a Latin adjective that means ‘pale blue-green’, referring to the coloration of the dorsal-lateral stripes of the new species,” Koch explained in the research, which was published in the scientific journal PLOS One.