The Herpetofauna of the Rincon Area, Peninsula de Osa, Costa Rica, a Central American Lowland Evergreen Forest Site

Ten to twelve thousand years ago, when humans first came from the north to enter the vast tropical evergreen lowland forests of Mexico and Central America, these forests stretched for what must have seemed an eternity, from the Veracruz lowlands 2,600 km southeastward into northern South America and beyond. Even eight to ten millennia later, when the Spanish conquistadores arrived on the shores of the American continent, these forests, although heavily disturbed in some areas by native Amerindian cultures, presented an aweinspiring continuum, a great and dark sea in the words of Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdez (1526), over most of the lowlands of Middle America. Until fairly recently, the humid lowland forest areas of the region have been relatively safe from the destructive agricultural and forestry practices that in postconquest times have denuded, "developed," or otherwise laid waste much of the drier and upland habitats of tropical America. Now even these long protected remnants of the most diverse and complicated of ecosystems are threatened with total annihilation, first, in the 1970s and 1980s, by the worldwide drive of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to convert these natural wonders into cattle land, and now to ever-increasing human population pressures for land and forest products. At the present rate of cutting and development, within the first two decades of this century nearly all of the Central American humid lowland evergreen forest habitats, the products of millions of years of evolution, seem certain of destruction.