For her doctoral dissertation, Yale's Nathalie Alomar decided to study a small amphibian that appeared to have eluded the forces of evolution.
She found that there is more to its evolution than meets the eye.
In a new study, Alomar and a team of scientists report that the story of the common woodland salamander - long considered a classic example of "evolutionary stasis," meaning that it has evolved into many species without changing its overall structure much at all - is more complicated than previously believed.
For the research, the team collected nearly 300 individual woodland salamanders - which are from the genus Plethodon, and ubiquitous in forests of the eastern United States - representing 30 distinct species. And while these animals looked quite similar, a subsequent laboratory analysis found that aspects of their physiology differed substantially.
