Two animals, one shape
Is a Salamander a Lizard?
They look almost the same and are not remotely related. The skin tells you which is which.
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Step 1 of 5
The shape is a coincidence, not a family likeness.
Four legs, a long body and a tail is simply a good design for getting about on the ground. Two unrelated groups arrived at it separately.
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Step 2 of 5
Start with the skin, because it settles it.
Which is why you find one under a damp log and the other on a hot wall. A lizard is covered in dry overlapping scales that hold water in. A salamander's skin is bare, soft and always damp — and it dries out and dies within hours in the sun.
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Step 3 of 5
That damp skin is also doing the breathing.
Oxygen passes straight through wet skin into the blood. Many salamanders have no lungs at all and breathe entirely this way, which is why the skin must stay wet.
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Step 4 of 5
The eggs are the other giveaway.
A lizard lays eggs with a tough shell that can sit on dry land. A salamander lays soft jelly eggs that must go in water or they shrivel.
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Step 5 of 5
And the small details all agree.
No claws, no ear openings, teeth in both jaws, and young that hatch with feathery gills. A lizard has none of that.
The old belief that salamanders were born from fire came from logs: one hiding in damp wood runs out when the log is put on the flames.
The short version
A salamander only looks like a lizard — it is an amphibian, with wet skin that breathes, no claws, and jelly eggs that must be laid in water.
Try it yourself
Compare a dry leaf and a wet one in your hand. The dry one keeps its water in; the wet one gives it up to the air. That is lizard skin against salamander skin.