Peering out from its burrow, a Red Hills salamander surveys the surrounding landscape for soft bodied bugs. The salamanders, which live only in a narrow band of the Red Hills, almost never leave the tiny caves they live in. (Courtesy of Ben Raines, Weeks Bay Foundation)

The moist, purple skin of the living fossil glistens in the late afternoon sun like a wet eggplant.

Tugged from its subterranean lair moments before after falling for a tiny hook baited with the head of a cricket, the endangered Red Hills salamander cradled in J.J. Apodaca’s hands is a female. And she is pregnant.

Apodaca, a biology professor at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, has been studying the salamanders, one of Alabama’s rarest creatures, for a decade. His research has helped define both the range and the size of the salamander population in the haunted valleys of the Red Hills.

These steep bluffs and the hollows below them in central Alabama are the oldest part of the Appalachian mountains, the first bones of a range that runs north to the Canadian border.

The hills are now the subject of great scientific interest, partly due to the discovery of the Red Hills Salamander in the 1960s. The species is much older than most salamander species, and likely diverged from the main lineage of salamanders 40 or 50 million years ago. Most common salamander species, by contrast, evolved from a common ancestor within the last 10 million years.

“These guys are really old. They evolved in this particular habitat, fitting into a niche in the Tallahatta rock formations here,” Apodaca said, referring to a band of limestone that stretches across this part of the state, and dates to a time when this portion of Alabama was part of the Gulf of Mexico. “They were restricted to this habitat, so they couldn’t spread. They have no close relatives.”

A setting sun sets a fern ablaze on a steep bluff in the Red Hills. The area served as a refuge during the ice ages that turned most of North America into frozen tundra. Plants and animals survived in the Red Hills, spreading away after the last ice age to help repopulate North America. (courtesy of Ben Raines, Weeks Bay Foundation)

The known range of the Red Hills salamander is about 30 miles long, and a few miles wide. They live nowhere else.

Apodaca said the salamanders, which form their own genus, were essentially an evolutionary dead end, a species that ceased evolving. In part, the salamanders were unable to evolve or spread because they are so closely tied to the bands of limestone that come to the surface in the Red Hills. Known as fossorial animals because they live underground, the salamanders carve networks of tunnels in the soft soil surrounding the rock outcroppings.

Because they breathe through their skin, they are unable to survive for more than a few minutes outside of their tunnels, unless it is a particularly moist day. Once their skin dries out, they are unable to absorb oxygen through their skin.

Oddly, the first Red Hills Salamander ever found was discovered under a rotting log during daylight hours. Apodaca said that in the 50 years since that discovery, only a few have ever been observed outside of their burrows.

As he handles the female, Apodaca periodically pours water over her body, keeping her moist.

“She has eggs,” he says, turning her over. The eggs are visible through the translucent skin on her belly. Her legs, less than half an inch long, are ridiculously short when compared to her total length of 11 inches. Her progress across a few inches of open ground after Apodaca releases her near the burrow entrance is agonizingly slow. There is no question she would be easy-pickings for even a slow moving animal like a turtle.

For that reason, the salamanders are almost never seen outside of their burrows, or in daylight. They haunt the crepuscular hours between dusk and dawn, sitting just inside the mouths of their borrows all night long, waiting for an unsuspecting roly poly or insect to march by. The strike, when it comes, is fast, the salamander’s gaping mouth opening broadly and swallowing its prey whole.

The discovery of the salamander, and especially the realization that the species was so ancient in origin, continue to excite biologists today. The creature is proof that ancient plants and animals persist in this portion of Alabama, though they are quite rare in the rest of the nation.

The animals survived here, like numerous other plant and animal species, because Alabama escaped the ravages of several ice ages spread over millions of years. While most of North America was buried beneath glaciers, Alabama remained warm enough to support life. That fact alone, scientists say, explains why Alabama is home to more species of fish, turtles, snails, mussels, crawfish and pitcher plants than any other state.

The only question is how many more species remain to be discovered here, hiding right under our noses for eons, like the Red Hills salamander.

Ben Raines is the executive director of the Weeks Bay Foundation, a non-profit land trust dedicated to preserving coastal Alabama.