A formal description was published in an untitled summary of this lecture (later titled as Über eine neue Schildkrötenart, Cinosternon effeldtii und einige andere neue oder weniger bekannte Amphibien) a year later (although dated to the previous year) by an anonymous author (edited by Ernst Kummer) in the monthly notice of the academy.
[8] In 1877 the famous US fossil baron Edward Drinker Cope, having received a frog specimen from somewhere on the west coast of Central America (fide Cochran (1961)), described it as Lithodytes pelviculus.
[3] In 1893 Cope described the frog a second time as a new species under the name Lithodytes florulentus, having acquired a single juvenile specimen, with the head damaged, from the "Boruca" in the canton of Buenos Aires in Puntarenas Province of the southern Pacific zone of Costa Rica, from one G. K.
[7] Albert Günther, working in Britain, moved this new taxon to Hylodes a few years later, in 1900,[3] and produced the first comprehensive check-lists for the countries of the region.
[9] Thus, by the turn of the previous century what is presently (2019) understood as this frog species consisted of two taxa and one mixed taxon, and in 1904 the Norwegian herpetologist Leonhard Stejneger moved them all to the genus Eleutherodactylus.
[3] In the second half of 1916, during the United States occupation of Nicaragua and in the midst of an anti-imperialist civil war, an American herpetological and ichthyological expedition was mounted to obtain new specimens for US museums.
As such, the expedition members returned without incident by early the next year, and the Harvard student Gladwyn Kingsley Noble set about describing the amphibians amongst their many collections.
[9] In 1921 Emmett Dunn collected what was thought to be the first specimen of E. rugosus known from Costa Rica near the town of Monteverde, himself and Tom Barbour not agreeing with Noble's synonymy.
[10] Throughout most of 20th century this species was considered to be two accepted species under Stejneger's Eleutherodactylus taxonomy: E. florulentus (still only known from a single damaged specimen, missing since the 19th century) and E. rugosus (at the time a mix of both modern E. rugosus and modern E. megacephalus, and thought to be distributed from Honduras (perhaps even Mexico) to Panama), but in 1975 John D. Lynch synonymised both E. florulentus and E. rugosus, along with the older nomen E. pelviculus and E. megacephalus, and the mysterious E. gulosus (also still only known from the initial collections at the time), with E. biporcatus -under which the frogs of this species were known for the next few decades, and which was henceforth thought to be distributed from Honduras to Peru.
They were unable to locate some (see above), but managed to discover that the actual holotype for E. biporcatus had been collected in Venezuela, not in Veraguas Province as had been thought previously.
Savage and Myers also synonymised E. florulentus and E. pelviculus with the earliest name; Peters' E. rugosus described in Germany in 1873,[7] as Günther had first partially suggested over a century earlier.
[10] According to Savage (2002) and Frost (2015), Craugastor rugosus is now found on the slopes and lowlands facing the Pacific from the downstream region of the Rio Carara in Costa Rica southwards to the southern part of far western Panama.
[3] However, it is possible that the distribution of this species in fact stretches further north and east than indicated, although the history of taxonomic confusion makes it complicated to ascertain.
Henry Sterling Blair collected a specimen for the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University in Zent, Limón Province, Costa Rica, in 1996.
[4] It is seen in Costa Rica in the Carara National Park,[3] the Fila Chonta mountains, the Osa Peninsula and in the harbour town of Quepos, all in Puntarenas Province.