Hellbender

movie?

Hellbender unequivocally Hellbender.

I love that movie.

The food in Hellbender is so beautifully shot and they shot that and styled that themselves.

So I'm like, y'all are just like one step away from being food photographers.

I had a food blog.

Well, I learned so much.

I mean, just one that popped in my head is Hellbender.

Yeah, I'd heard that term being from North Carolina.

Of course, I'd heard that term.

There's a ultra marathon that I want to do one day in the North Carolina mountains called the Hellbender 100.

And I remember thinking that's a cool name, but I never knew what it meant.

And then and then just the other day, I was I had some girls had some friends.

What? Yeah.

Hellbenders?

Sure.

Oh, the Hellbender would have been a great logo for this team.

Yeah, Hellbenders would be a great name for a team, I think.

Okay.

But just any kind of salamander because the Blue Ridge Mountains have some of the best salamander finding in the world.

Wow.

That's like up there with Hellbender.

That's

right.

Listener Brian wrote in, no relation: "Dear Brian, I must have missed 903 on the giant California salamander, because I surely would have noticed an omission in that article.

You probably have heard about it since the article was published, but just in case, North America does have a much larger salamander than Dicamptodon, and it is the North American relative to the Asian species of Andrias, Cryptobranchus, the hellbender.

Your speculative historical biogeography is correct, and there are multiple clades that have an Eastern North American, Eastern Asian distribution, like alligators, for example.

Good old plate tectonics driving unusual species' geographic distributions.