# @natgeo on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CO0sWUIjMQC
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/11684672-natgeo-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/9deb511d5a.jpg
- **Posted:** 2021-05-13T18:33:01.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** National Geographic (@NatGeo) — https://gondola.cc/NatGeo

## Caption

Photos by renan_ozturk / Here's a snapshot of National Geographic's Lost World Expedition, a scientific "transect" of the Upper Paikwa River Basin—near Guyana’s northwestern border with Brazil and Venezuela—whose participants are looking for new species of amphibians and reptiles in one of the world’s richest and least explored hotspots of biodiversity. Words by m_synnott: 

Look hard enough and you can find frogs anywhere, from the Arctic to the Sahara. But nowhere are they more plentiful than in the rainforests that girdle South America’s equator. At last count, scientists like Bruce Means had cataloged about 1,000 species in the Amazon Basin. Of course, these are only the ones we know about; Means says there are likely ten times yet to be discovered. Sadly, we'll never know how many have already been lost to extinction. 

The reason for so much frog biodiversity in the Amazon is that speciation takes place over evolutionary time—and DNA analysis of tree frogs collected on past expeditions in this basin suggests that many of them took up residence between 70 and 80 million years ago. “The longer life is allowed to proliferate in a rich, untrammeled environment like the Paikwa River Basin," Means says, "the more that species will differentiate and diversify.”

Over the years, his quest to document this biodiversity has become more urgent: he's witnessed firsthand how freelance Guyanese mining prospectors have been transforming once pristine rainforests and rivers into poisoned scars in the earth. 

“There was no more important contribution I could make to the world than to document as much of this biodiversity as I could before it was lost forever," Means says. There are tiny universes of life all around us that we don’t even know exist. And when they disappear, they become missing strands in the ecological web that connects all living things. #thelostworldexpedition #biodiversitymatters taylorfreesolo

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## Tags

biodiversitymatters, thelostworldexpedition

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