Your Axolotl Is a Salamander That Never Grew Up

[00:00:00]Did you know your axolotl is technically a salamander that never grew up? The axolotl is actually a tiger salamander, but something in its biology hits pause before metamorphosis ever begins. It keeps its feathery gills, [music] its flat tail, its soft juvenile body, and it stays that way for its entire life.

[00:00:19]Scientists call this neoteny, and it makes the axolotl one of the strangest developmental puzzles in all of vertebrate biology. Here is where it gets wild. In the 1860s, a French zoologist named Auguste Duméril [music] was breeding axolotls at the Paris Museum of Natural History. One day, a group [music] of them spontaneously transformed. The gills vanished. The body hardened. They crawled out of the water as [music] fully terrestrial salamanders. Scientists who saw them had no idea what animal they were looking at. The creature had completed a life it was never supposed to finish.

[00:00:53]>> [music] >> So, when you look at your axolotl floating in its tank, you're not just watching a quirky aquatic pet. You're watching a creature permanently frozen at an earlier stage of a life it never completes.