Anyone know what this is . I have lived in upstate NY my whole life and I don't believe I have ever seen one of these. It was dead on a trail . Almost looks like it was eaten and pooped out . Lol

It was about 5 inches long

looks like a salamander to me. was traveling for love most likely and got too dry.

Spotted salamander

Thanks to all

Was it cold when you found it by chance? They're cold blooded so he could've just been a little chilly. Danny might be right though, he looks a little dried out.

He is dried out and dead . It did get really cold here last week .

Google blue spotted salamander

We have those blue spotted salamanders here.Very very rare to find one though.
Put him in water maybe he'll come back to life-salamanders are weird like that.They can re grow missing limbs.

Pretty common here the same ones as that one.

The large, heavy bodied salamanders, like that blue spotted salamander, are neat. I gave an around 4 inch tiger salamander, I found, to a friend of mines son. They had it for around 5 years. It grew to 14 inches long. It didn't look like a real live animal. It looked like a huge, colorful, rubber or plastic toy. It was a voracious eater. It got very excited when they fed it and would gobble down a large nightcrawler in seconds.

Keith

I saw the same kind of salamander inside a water meter box last fall. Scared me to reach inside. Thought maybe it was poisonous, but it isn’t.

We have ones like that out here in the swamp only they have yellow spots. Caught about a dozen of them in a minnow trap once. I let them all go. It was pretty neat tho.

As long as we're on the subject of salamanders, here's a pacific giant I found last fall, there are actually a lot of them where I found this one. They seem pretty picky about where they live, I never see them in the lowlands of Washington like I did when I was a kid (60's-70's). I think they must be pretty susceptible to chemicals, etc.
I think the only larger ones in the US are hellbenders, this one was probably just over 10 inches long.

I have mudpuppies in my pond here in PA. A large salamander that gets over 12".

Here’s a picture of my granddaughter with a young mudpuppy she caught yesterday while trying to catch frogs in our pond. The two adults I saw last year must’ve had a successful mating.

We have only seen a blue spotted salamander here. I recall being on my way home from a business trip and Zim had found one when he was cutting up some downed trees in our woods. He knew I would like to see the little guy when I got home, so he put it in his pocket and took it up to the house. He set it in a container in a refrigerator in our basement. When I got home, he went to get it but the container was open and he was gone! I laughed so hard. I used to take care of quite a few amphibians. I looked in the fridge and could see immediately where he'd be. A bag of freshly picked, garden lettuce was sitting on the shelf in the fridge. Sure enough, the little guy had moved into the luxury lettuce suite! I still laugh thinking of that!

I took him outside and hung out with him until he warmed up and got active again. I took this terrible photo (sorry) and didn't notice it wasn't in focus when I took it.

He was so cute and colorful, I wish I had a better photo of him.

Anyway, Greenetrapper, his spots were really bright blue. Not sure if he could be a similar variety.

Here we have both the blue spited ones and the tigers

Back in the early 80s I used to work for a restaurant named the Foolish Steer in spring lake park which was on the shore of laddy lake almost every year there would be literally 1000s of them that would come up out of the lake and cross the parking lot, sometimes there were so many you couldn’t step between them and the boss would have us go out and pick them up into boxes and move them out of the area, and HWY 65 in that area would acquire a coating of smashed one

Would only go on for several hours over one day and then it would be just a few stragglers over the next few and then it all stopped and hasn’t happened again as far as I know

Thank you for all the replies. I am 41 years old and have spent most of my life Hunting Fishing trapping and in the woods. That is the first time I have ever seen a salamander like that. Unfortunately he was dead. It was a very cool looking salamander though