On Sundays, El Valle's open-air market fills up, and vendors come in to sell fresh fruits, decorative plants and artwork. Among brilliant lilies and serpentine orchids, you will find that vendors offer hundreds of carved and sculpted yellow frogs on sale. Many of these frogs sit hopefully on toadstools, looking at the sky. Some cheerfully adorn ceramic cookery or sit in sexually suggestive poses. Others are talking on cell phones or surfing the internet.
The Panamanian golden frog is a brilliant bright yellow amphibian – a toad actually - with blotches of animated black; a kind of living jewel. And everything about it – its delicate and slight body, its elusiveness, its unusual behaviors, and the myths and folk tales it has spawned across Panama, have made the frog become like a national symbol. The frog is a Buckingham Palace, a Bald Eagle, an Eiffel Tower for a young country.
If you were to go back in time and bring back the evolutionary history of this tiny animal in time-lapse footage, you would see a story of narrow escapes and incredible odds. A story populated by dinosaurs and shifting continents, exploding volcanoes. You would experience one episode of the greatest story on Earth. The time lapse footage would have ended two years ago, right here in El Valle, when David Attenborough's BBC film crew announced that the golden frog was extinct.
Grandfather and granddaughter, 
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