The frog the team found there lives between 2,354 and 2,893 metres and nowhere else. It is among the smallest of its genus: females reach barely 26 millimetres, males less than 23. Grey-brown on the back, marked with whitish flecks. Specimens were gathered on expeditions in 2012 and again in 2016, and the description has now appeared in the journal Zootaxa.
How anything of that size survives on an exposed ridge with almost no standing water is a matter of biology rather than luck. Frogs of the family Strabomantidae skip the tadpole entirely. The female lays a small clutch on land, and what hatches is already a froglet. No pond required — which is precisely why these animals can occupy summits where water runs off the sand and disappears.
The mountains kept their secrets for a long time, and not by accident. The Cordillera del Cóndor was disputed ground between Ecuador and Peru, militarised for decades and fought over in the Cenepa War of 1995, the last conventional war in South America. Only after the Brasilia Presidential Act settled the boundary in 1998 could biologists walk in. What they found, survey after survey, were plants, frogs and small mammals that had never been named.
The genus itself carries a name given in tribute: Lynchius, erected in 2008 for John D. Lynch, the herpetologist who spent decades describing Andean rain frogs. Almendariz, Brito and Ron continued the habit. They named their frog for Katya Romoleroux, the Ecuadorian botanist awarded the National Eugenio Espejo Prize in 2020.
The reserve that protects Cerro Plateado covers just over 26,000 hectares. Below it, in the same province, the Mirador open-pit copper mine has been in commercial production since 2019, and concessions cover a good part of the range's foothills. The frog's entire known world is a few hundred metres of sand and shrub at the top of a mountain that took three days to reach.