Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week, nothing less than life and death for the inhabitants of planet Earth as we look back at the history of

extinction from tiny amphibians. Many many scientists were talking to their friends

and they all realized that there were these mysterious disappearances of frogs from Costa Rica,

from Australia, from places that were protected and least threatened.

To the emblematic flightless dodo.

It might be just a phonetic rendering of the birds called dodo.

Another explanation is that maybe it was a Portuguese word which meant stupid.

Along with some key moments in our empathy for the animal kingdom, like the discovery that

Wales sing.

Oh, noo! Move. That's coming up later in the podcast, but we begin by looking at a relatively recent

extinction episode. In the 1980s, scientists started to notice

that frogs were dying in huge numbers. Alejandro Martins has been speaking to

Dr Karen Lips, who helped establish that the amphibians were being killed by a deadly fungus

in what's now recognized as the greatest loss of biodiversity in the history of our time.

We sort of get a double whammy. It's the worst disease and it's also one of the worst

invasive species.

Biologist Karen Lips is a professor at the University of Maryland in the US and one of the key scientists that unraveled the

Enigma. The story begins in 1989 when she was a grad student and doing her

amphibian research in Central America on the top of a mountain that straddles the border

between southern Costa Rica and Panama.

I rented a small shack from a Costa Rican family who had a farm up there and I lived in one of their

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