New species of giant salamander discovered in Florida
Scientists have discovered a two-foot-long salamander species in Florida and Alabama that has the spots of a leopard and the body of an eel.
There have been whispers for decades that a creature with the spots of a leopard and the body of an eel lurked in the swamps of Florida and Alabama. Rumor had it the animal was as long as a man’s arm, with glistening gray skin, and frills on either side of its face.
But unlike Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, this animal is real. And today scientists have given it a name: the reticulated siren.
“It was basically this mythical beast,” says David Steen, a wildlife ecologist at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center and co-author of a paper officially describing the new species published December 5 in the journal PLOS ONE. Informally, people have called it the leopard eel,
