Spermophilus major (Pallas 1778)

[Mus] major Pallas 1778, Nova Spec. Quad. Glir. Ord.: 125.

Type Locality: "Steppe near Samara," [Kuibyshev, Kuibyshevsk. Obl., Russia] (Ognev, 1963 a:34) .

Vernacular Names: Russet Ground Squirrel.

Synonyms: Spermophilus argyropuloi (Bazhanov 1947); Spermophilus rufescens (Keyserling and Blasius 1840); Spermophilus selevini (Argyropulo 1941) .

Distribution: Steppe between Volga and Irtysh rivers (Russia; N Kazakhstan). Formerly, steppe between Don and Volga rivers (Russia; Gromov et al., 1965:291). Reported from Xinjiang (Ma et al., 1987); but probably a misidentified brevicauda .

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (nt).

Discussion: Subgenus Colobotis according to Gromov et al. (1965:290), but see Hall (1981:381) who included Colobotis in subgenus Spermophilus . Occasionally hybridizes with brevicauda and fulvus (Denisov, 1963; Nikol’skii and Starikov, 1997; Ognev, 1947), and more widely with pygmaeus and suslicus (Ermakov, 1996) . Corbet (1978 c:84) provisionally included erythrogenys and brevicauda in this species, but Gromov et al. (1965:290) and Vorontsov and Lyapunova (1970) considered erythrogenys a distinct species, and Gromov et al. (1965:315) included brevicauda in erythrogenys; see comment under those species. S. major is geographically cohesive, and allopatrically distributed with respect to brevicauda, and allopatric (Bobrinskii et al., 1965:61) or narrowly sympatric to erythrogenys (Sludskii et al., 1969:162) . In contrast, it it genetically unstable, grouping with either brevicauda or pygmaeus in sequence data (Harrison et al., 2003), probably as a result of hybridization (see specimens examined). Formerly included relictus (Ellerman and Morrison-Scott, 1955) .