The species was known only from a few square kilometres of elfin cloud forest above Monteverde in Costa Rica. Males gathered at ephemeral pools in the spring rains in numbers that made them conspicuous. Ecologist Martha Crump documented the 1987 aggregation of roughly fifteen hundred adults and the collapse that followed in the next two seasons.
Two mechanisms are implicated. An unusually dry period linked to the 1986 to 1987 El Nino left breeding pools drying before tadpoles could develop. Around the same time the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis was spreading through Central American highland amphibians, causing mass mortality in a long list of species. The two pressures may have combined.
The golden toad became the emblem of the global amphibian decline because its disappearance happened inside a protected reserve with no logging, pollution or collecting to blame. It was declared extinct by the IUCN, and its case reframed conservation thinking about threats that protected-area boundaries cannot exclude.