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with utter shock on my face, I watched a woman pull this large dead lizard out of the marsh. she said she found it in the water. she started dangling it around to scare friends and family which was kinda funny tbh.

it was at least 2 feet long, maybe even 3 feet long. i know of no native animal that this could even remotely be.... it looks a lot like a Chinese water dragon, in which case it probably was a pet that was released by someone who couldnt take care of it (this is why we need to end the commodification of "exotic animals" and work to undo commodification and capitalism in general)

Now this was a bit of a surprise.
Swam out when I lifted a rock. It then tucked into a space nearby. Very weird things. Habitat shot last. That's the spot he was in before I flipped the rock.

~4cm long
Lower intertidal.

Juvenile Aneides are tough, but here are my reasons:

• toe tips are not enlarged or squared off
• bases of the limbs have pale yellow markings, a trait mentioned in Stebbins
• in a very moist mixed redwood / tanoak forest, at most 50 m from running water

Aberrant coloration. At first we thought it was a N. fasciata x N. clarkii hybrid but the dorsal pattern is too banded (not stripey) and the ventral pattern is unstriped but not plain, albeit very low contrast (orange vs yellow half-moons). Compare a few other "hypomelanistic" N. fasciata from nearby:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/67151325

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/109373290

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/70033204

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/67151325