Mole Salamander - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The genera Dicamptodon and Rhyacotriton were formerly included in this family, but are now usually placed into their own families Dicamptodontidae and Rhyacotritonidae. In 2006, a large study of amphibian systematics (Frost et al., Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 297 (2006) placed Dicamptodon back within Ambystomatidae, based on cladistic analysis. This has been accepted by the Center for North American Herpetology.

Rhyacosiredon used to be considered a separate genus within the family Ambystomatidae. However, cladistic analysis of the mole salamanders found that the existence of Rhyacosiredon makes Ambystoma paraphyletic, since the species are more closely related to some Ambystoma species than those species are to others in Ambystoma. The stream-type morphology of these salamanders (which includes larvae and neotenes with short gills and thicker gular folds) may have led to their misclassification as a different genus.

The genus name Ambystoma is traditionally translated as "cup-mouth," but is actually nonsense. Johann Jakob von Tschudi, who described the genus, intended to call it Amblystoma, "blunt-mouth." However, he misspelled the genus as Ambystoma at many points throughout his description. Under biological naming rules, the misspelling Ambystoma takes precedence and cannot be changed. This is especially true because it was widely used by other authors. Occasionally, old specimens and documents will bear the intended genus name.