The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species

The Costa Rican cloud forest, a mysterious amphibian killer, and a vanished species: with support from Leonardo DiCaprio's Re: wild campaign, twin documentarians and environmental writers follow their father's footsteps into the heart of the modern extinction crisis.

As young boys, Trevor and Kyle Ritland were fascinated by the magnificent golden toad of Costa Rica, a brilliant species their biologist father showed them in his projector's slide shows. Native to only one wind-battered ridgeline high on the continental divide above the cloud forests of Monteverde, thousands of golden toads would congregate for a few weeks each year in ephemeral pools among the twisted roots to mate, deposit their offspring, and retreat again beneath the earth. But from one year to the next, the toads disappeared without a trace; the last of them vanished more than thirty years ago. Since then, only rumors remain--alleged sightings by local residents, which beg the question: could the golden toad still be alive?

In The Golden Toad, Trevor and Kyle set off to investigate an environmental mystery with unexpected revelations, a story that speaks to our own collective and uncertain future. Guided by Costa Rican naturalists--including the last person to have seen the golden toad alive--Trevor searches for survivors while Kyle hunts the killer, and their paths lead them through an imperiled forest, a deadly pandemic, and a changing climate, finally intertwining at the site of the golden toad's last emergence deep in Monteverde's Bosque Eterno de Los Niños.

The toad's demise becomes a haunting foretelling of approaching ecological crisis, but with a gold lining on the horizon. The Golden Toad changes the conversation around extinction, climate change, and conservation while exploring environmental grief, resurrection, and hope in a changing world.

Author: Trevor Ritland,Kyle Ritland
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 06/17/2025
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.30w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9781635769968


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/07/2025
Booklist 05/14/2025

About the Author
Trevor Ritland spent two years in the cloud forests of Costa Rica before returning to the US to complete graduate work in documentary studies and science communication. He is an adjunct instructor in the Creative Media & Film program at Northern Arizona University and is the documentarian of "El Dorado: The Search for the Golden Toad" along with other projects exploring imperiled species and environmental mysteries. Trevor lives with his wife Priscilla and their dog Indie in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Trevor and Kyle founded Adventure Term, Inc., a nonprofit teaching environmental storytelling through field expeditions. Beyond writing for publications like The Atlantic, BBC, and The Guardian, they have collaborated with Leonardo DiCaprio's RE: WILD on the organization's "Search for Lost Species" campaign.

Kyle Ritland earned his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside while working as a freelance environmental journalist, chasing stories of island foxes, desert birds, and big cats. He lives at the edge of the woods in the American Northeast with his wife Alannah and their two cats, Hazel and Fiver.