The species disappears from the Earth entirely.

This is not a remote theoretical concern.

It is a practical conservation reality that applies to dozens or hundreds of species on Roraima and across the tepui highlands.

A Mountain For The Long View

The final truth about Roraima is that it is a place most humans will never stand on, and yet it matters to all of us.

It matters because the biological processes that produced its endemic species — evolution, natural selection, isolation, divergence — are the same processes that produced every species on Earth, including our own.

The Roraima bush toad, evolving direct development in response to summit conditions, is doing what life always does when conditions demand adaptation: solving the problem at hand with the materials available, one generation at a time.