They bear no relationship to alligators and other reptiles, however; instead, they’re a type of salamander known as the newt—in this case, the Eastern or red-spotted newt (Notophthalmus viridescens).Like frogs and toads, salamanders are amphibians, meaning that they can lead a double life, one stage aquatic and the other terrestrial. The newts, however, have added a unique extra complexity in that they have not two but three distinct life stages, two of them aquatic and one terrestrial. Further, in a rather mystifying anomaly, some red-spotted newts skip the second, intermediate stage and spend both life stages in the water!When is a newt not a newt? The answer to this riddle is linguistic rather than biological, and lies far in the past. In Old English (also termed Anglo-Saxon), spoken in England from about A.D. 450 to A.D. 1050, this type of salamander was originally known as an efete. This soon became evet and, in an unusual shift from v to w a little later still, ewt.
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