For her doctoral dissertation, Yale’s Nathalie Alomar decided to study a small amphibian that appeared to have eluded the forces of evolution. She found that there is more to its evolution than meets the eye.

In a new study, Alomar and a team of scientists report that the story of the common woodland salamander—long considered a classic example of “evolutionary stasis,” meaning that it has evolved into many species without changing its overall structure much at all—is more complicated than previously believed.