Spermophilus (Spermophilus) musicus Ménétries 1832

Spermophilus (Spermophilus) musicus Ménétries 1832, Cat. Raisonne des Objets de Zoologie, St. Petersbourg: 21.

Type Locality: "Il habite le Caucase sur les montagnes le plus élevées et pas loin des nieges éternalles." Restricted by Sviridenko (1927, see Ognev, 1963 a:114) to "Ush-Kulan [Georgia]" .

Vernacular Names: Caucasian Mountain Ground Squirrel.

Synonyms: Spermophilus (Spermophilus) boehmii (Krassovskii 1932); Spermophilus (Spermophilus) magisteri (Heptner 1948); Spermophilus (Spermophilus) saturatus (Ognev 1947); Spermophilus (Spermophilus) typicus (Satunin 1908) .

Distribution: N Caucasus Mtns (Georgia).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc).

Discussion: Subgenus Spermophilus (Gromov et al., 1965:249) . Regarded by Ellerman and Morrison-Scott (1951:508) and Corbet (1978 c:83) as a subspecies of pygmaeus . Gromov et al. (1965:249) and Vorontsov and Lyapunova (1970) provided evidence of specific distinctness. Molecular sequence data place it close to pygmaeus (Harrison et al., 2003) .