The South China giant salamander (Andrias sligoi ) may be the largest species of salamander and the largest amphibian in the world. It is endemic to southern China, mainly in the Pearl River basin south of the Nanling Mountains. It is extremely endangered and may no longer exist in the wild.
It was described in 1924 (as Megalobatrachus sligoi ) by Edward George Boulenger from a captive specimen held in the London Zoo. This individual was originally held in the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens and may have originated from Guangxi or Guangdong Province, and was likely one of many giant salamanders captured from the mainland and placed in the Botanical Gardens' fountain, all of which had escaped. During a particularly violent storm in April 1920, a large drain pipe in the Gardens burst, carving a large depression into the land that the escaped salamander was washed into. It was captured and kept in a large circular basin, where it was fed daily with live tadpoles and occasionally beef.
The captured salamander was later seen by George Ulick Browne, the then-Marquess of Sligo, as he was touring the area. Browne persuaded the then-governor of Hong Kong, Reginald Edward Stubbs, to present the salamander to the Zoological Society of London. Upon receiving the individual, Boulenger found it to be physically distinct from "Megalobatrachus maximus " (the former species into which his father, George Albert Boulenger, lumped both the Japanese giant salamander and Chinese giant salamander) and it thus likely represented a new species. During Boulenger's description, he named the species M. sligoi in honor of Browne's title.
It is possible that A. sligoi may be the largest extant amphibian today, a superlative generally attributed to A. davidianus. The largest known Andrias specimen was a 1.8 m (5.9 ft) individual captured near Guiyang in Guizhou Province in the early 1920s. Although historical specimens collected near Guizhou do not have enough usable DNA to identify the species they belong to, more recent specimens collected from the region cluster with A. sligoi, meaning that the largest collected individual may have been an A. sligoi, rather than A. davidianus or a related species.
