Newly Found ‘Giant Salamander Species’ Now the ‘World's Biggest Amphibian’

Zoologists have found a newly identified amphibian, which they claim is the world’s biggest amphibian. Researchers from London’s National History Museum and Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have identified new species of the giant salamander using the DNA from the museum specimens and came to the conclusion that this species is the biggest.

According to National Geographic, scientists have long known that the largest amphibians are the giant salamanders of China. The giant salamanders can grow more than five feet in length, but are now endangered in the wild. Scientists earlier have considered them to be of one species, but with the new DNA analysis, it came out that Chinese giant salamanders are not the only one, but there are at least three different species of salamanders.

According to the study published on September 17 in the journal Ecology and Evolution, the species, which is the largest of the three, has been given a new name, Andrias sligoi or the South China giant salamander and researchers believe that this is the largest amphibian alive today.

Professor Samuel Turvey of Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and a researcher associated with this project told BBC, “We hope that this new understanding of their species diversity has arrived in time to support their successful conservation, but urgent measures are required to protect any viable giant salamander populations that might remain”. 

He also said that the decline in the number of their population has been attributed to over killing of the amphibian for food, along with habitat loss and poaching.

The Chinese giant salamander is a huge animal, which is known to grow up to 1.8 metres long. They are very rare in the wild, but millions of the salamanders are now kept in farms. In the farms only one species of salamander were kept, that is found across China – Andrias davidianus. 

The other species are “largely eliminated from the wild,” says Samuel Turvey, adding “each distinct species requires targeted and separate conservation management, both to locate any surviving wild populations and hopefully to establish species-specific conservation breeding programmes”.

Turvey and his team of researchers analysed DNA taken from liver, muscle or bone samples of 41 earliest species of Chinese giant salamanders, some of which were from museum specimen’s dates back to 1920. Finally, the team found three distinct species of salamanders from southern, central and eastern China. 

Turvey suggests the South China giant salamander is probably the biggest of the three and may grow up to nearly 2 metres long.“Chinese giant salamanders have traditionally been thought to be a single species,” says Samuel Turvey. 

These animals are extensively moved around China by humans to stock farms for food and are used for other medicinal purposes. The movement of the amphibians made it difficult to determine their place of origin. The farming industry started in Shaanxi Province and central China.

But the genetic analysis of these animals proves that the different species split off from one another between 3.1 and 2.4 million years ago, which also coincides with a period of mountain formation of the Tibetan Plateau. The mountains could have isolated these giant salamander populations and led to the distinct species, researchers believe.