Giant Salamander

Review: @killdozer

Vote now: (5 stars = masterpiece)

Number of votes: 4 | average rating: 5

What a beauty. Imagine how different our childhoods would have been if we had these living in ponds across the UK instead of our rather puny European newt... children would run screaming from the bottom of the garden, jam jars would need to be the size of baths and collecting spawn would require a shovel.

What is really cool about the giant salamander is in 1726, the Swiss physician Johann Jakob Scheuchzer described a fossil as Homo diluvii testis (Latin: "Evidence of a diluvian human"), believing it to be the remains of a human being that drowned in the biblical Deluge. For a category of creature believed to be primitive and ancient, to be mistaken for a monkey by an actual doctor is quite a trick. They are also the only amphibians known to live in water at high altitudes. Which is also cool... (geddit?)

Check it out