Scientists discover ancient salamander preserved in amber

Twenty million years ago, this likely slippery, prehistoric amphibian got in a skirmish with another animal, had its leg bitten off, then fell into gooey resin and was fossilized forever in amber. Additionally, the salamander appears to be one of a kind, as its species has never been seen before and is now extinct.

Nature is the greatest craftsman of all and recent findings come to prove this as the Caribbean seas reveal amber-encased salamander fossil.

Researchers from Oregon State University and University of California, Berkeley recently published their findings about the Palaeoplethodon hispaniolae in the journal Palaeodiversity.

The species of the amber-preserved salamander has been named Palaeonplethodon hispaniolae by the researchers.

“There are very few salamander fossils of any type, and no one has ever found a salamander preserved in amber”, study author George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus in the Oregon State’s College of Science, said in a press release. It is believed to be a very distant relative of a common species now found in North America, specifically the Appalachian Mountains.

‘Finding it in Dominican amber was especially unexpected, because today no salamanders, even living ones, have ever been found in that region’.

“It had back and front legs lacking distinct toes, just nearly complete webbing with little bumps on them”. This means, it probably lived in small trees as the taller ones were inaccessible to it. The food preferences of the reptile remain unknown for the moment, but scientists are convinced that the reptile took its food from tropical flowering plants.

As to how the species was eliminated from the region, “They may have been killed by some climatic event, or were vulnerable to some type of predator”, Dr. Poinar said. The physical evidence suggests the fossil represents an early lineage of phethodon salamanders that evolved in tropical America.

The salamander was found in an amber mine between Puerto Plata and Santiago, Discovery News reported.

This fossil is 20-30 million years previous, and its lineage might return 40-60 million years in the past when the Proto-Higher Antilles, that now embrace islands resembling Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, have been nonetheless joined to North and South America. Maybe salamanders drifted to the Caribbean when the islands were moved on tectonic plates, or perhaps the amphibians crossed a land bridge when sea level was low.

Dr Poinar said finds such as the entombed lizard help ecologists and geologists to reconstruct ancient events in the Earth’s history. “All of those findings assist us reconstruct organic and geological elements of historic ecosystems”.