Palaeoplethodon hispaniolae is an extinct salamander species found in Miocene Dominican amber from the Dominican Republic. It is so far the only salamander species known to have existed in the Caribbean.
Palaeoplethodon hispaniolae is an extinct salamander species found in Miocene Dominican amber from the Dominican Republic. It is so far the only salamander species known to have existed in the Caribbean.
== Discovery and description == thumb|left|Restoration The only known specimen was a juvenile found in an amber mine in the mountain range between Puerto Plata and Santiago. The amber itself was from the extinct legume species Hymenaea protera. The salamander is missing its left front leg, implying possible predation. Its legs did not have any distinct toes, rather, it had complete webbing with small bumps on it. It most likely lived in small trees or in tropical flowers.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).