Spermophilus brevicauda Brandt 1843

Spermophilus brevicauda Brandt 1843, Bull. Acad. Sci. St. Petersbourg: 364.

Type Locality: "Habitat, ut videtur, in provincis Altaicis australiorbis versus lacum Balchasch" (Ognev, 1947:83). Ellerman and Morrison-Scott (1966:508) however, cite "Zaisan basin", after Kuznetsov (1944).

Vernacular Names: Brandt's Ground Squirrel.

Synonyms: Spermophilus carruthersi (Thomas 1912); Spermophilus intermedius (Brandt 1844); Spermophilus ilensis (Belyaev 1945); Spermophilus saryarka (Selevin 1937); Spermophilus selevini (Argyropolu 1941) .

Distribution: Zaisan depression south and westward along the Tien Shan mountains to the vicinity of Almaty, on both sides of the Kazakh-Chinese border (see Ma et al., 1987).

Discussion: Subgenus Colobotis according to Gromov et al. (1965:315), but see Hall (1981:381) who included Colobotis in subgenus Spermophilus . See comments in erythrogenys, of which brevicauda was long considered a subspecies. A phylogeny based on molecular sequence data separates brevicauda from erythrogenys, pallidicauda, and alashanicus (Harrison et al., 2003) .