Just announced this week, the researchers who discovered the salamander describe it in the Journal of Zoology. They have dubbed it the patch-nosed salamander after the yellow patch on the animal’s snout and it is the second smallest salamander in the United States.

Scientists found the 2-inch-long (5.1-centimeter-long) amphibian (pictured above) in 2007, in a creek near a well-traveled road in northern Georgia.

“This animal is really a spectacular find,” says biologist Carlos Camp of Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, who led the team which described the new species. “It is the first genus of amphibian, indeed of any four-footed vertebrate, discovered in the US in nearly 50 years.”

Two graduate students, Bill Peterman of the University of Missouri, Columbia and Joe Milanovich of the University of Georgia, Athens discovered the first example of the species, scientifically named Urspelerpes brucei. They took the animal to Camp for identification, according to the BBC News and NatGeo.

A geneticist, Trip Lamb, of East Carolina University, Greenville and a bone specialist, David Wake of the University of California at Berkeley. John Maerz, a professor at the University of Georgia, completed the research team.

A yellow male with stripes above a more muted female.

Males have a pair of distinct dark stripes running down the sides of the body and a yellow back. Females lack stripes and are more muted in color.

Males also have 15 vertebrae, one less than females. Yet while most species of lungless salamander have male and females of differing sizes, those of Urspelerpes brucei are close to being equal in size.
Uniquely for such a small lungless salamander, Urspelerpes brucei has five toes, whereas most other small species have reduced that number to four.

The last previously new genus of amphibian living in the US to be described, in 1961, was also a lungless salamander, the Red Hills Salamander of southern Alabama.