Brachycephalus is a frog genus endemic to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and characterized by the bright yellow-orange aposematic colors and the high degree of miniaturization. Herein, we describe a new species of Brachycephalus from Serra do Brigadeiro, Municipality of Ervália, Minas Gerais State, southeastern Brazil. Specimens were collected at high altitudes (i.e., 1266-1498 m above sea level) amidst the leaf litter. The new species is characterized by the presence of black connective tissue covering all dorsal muscles, body completely yellow-orange in life, presence of skull and post-cranial plates, large size (SVL of adults: 14.8-18.5 mm), bufoniform body, absence of metacarpal and metatarsal tubercles, and presence of harmonics in its advertisement call.

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The Odontophrynus americanus species group is a complex of diploid and tetraploid species hardly distinguished by morphological characters. It currently consists of three allopatric diploid species (i.e. O. cordobae, O. lavillai, and O. maisuma) and one widely distributed tetraploid species (i.e. O. americanus). We herein describe a new diploid allopatric species from campo rupestre, a typical phytophysiognomy of the Espinhaço Range, Brazil. The new species is distinguishable by the diploid complement of 2n = 2x = 22 chromosomes, small to medium-sized dorsal dark brown blotches with low contrast on a light brown background, light mid-dorsal stripe absent or greatly interrupted in most specimens with yellowish coloration as the background of both head and flanks of the body, advertisement call with dominant frequency of 840-1080 Hz, pulse rate of 90.5-106.7 pulses/s, and small tadpoles (TL = 24.30-35.69 mm).

The field of Bioacoustics has flourished in the past few decades, with numerous initiatives towards its application as a tool for biodiversity conservation. Despite the development of new methods involving computational programming and machine learning algorithms, higher accuracy is still needed for species identification, which is why we present herein the new SoundShape package for R platform. The new package focuses on implementing the eigensound method, a promising, and yet little explored protocol for bioacoustical analysis. The eigensound function is the main feature of SoundShape, allowing its user to convert sound waves into a dataset that can be analysed similar to coordinate sets from Geometric Morphometrics Methods, thus enabling the direct comparison between stereotyped calls from different species. Besides, SoundShape also features complementary functions for basic analysis of quantitative variation and illustration of hypothetical sound shapes representing the sample of sounds. Implementation of SoundShape is summarized through a workflow guide, using data from the new package. The sample study resulted in nearly 90% variation expressed in an ordination plot, therefore successfully summarizing complex sound waves previously described by large datasets of amplitude values. Moreover, we also introduce two addendums to eigensound: (a) three steps to prevent errors and biased results—aimed at securing a meaningful comparison between acoustic units from different species; and (b) the option of applying a logarithmic grid on the x‐axis (time)—which emphasizes short duration calls while also encompassing long ones. SoundShape package now provide the tools required for anyone to replicate and implement the eigensound method on the r platform. This will enable future studies to focus on further exploring the applications of sound shape analysis on various scientific areas, including (but not limited to) taxonomy, systematics, evolution, acoustic niche partitioning, soundscape ecology and machine learning algorithms focused on species identification for conservation biology.

Bokermannohyla Faivovich, Haddad, Garcia, Frost, Campbell & Wheeler (2005) is a Brazilian treefrog genus currently composed of 32 species (Brandão et al. 2012; Leite et al. 2012; Frost 2015). The genus comprehends four, putatively monophyletic, species groups: B. circumdata, B. claresignata, B. martinsi, and B. pseudopseudis (sensu Faivovich et al. 2005). The B. pseudopseudis group includes nine species: B. alvarengai (Bokermann 1956), B. flavopicta Leite et al. 2012, B. ibitiguara (Cardoso 1983), B. itapoty Lugli & Haddad 2006a, B. oxente Lugli & Haddad 2006b, B. pseudopseudis (Miranda-Ribeiro 1937), B. sagarana Leite et al. 2011, B. sapiranga Brandão et al. 2012, and B. saxicola (Bokermann 1964).