Spermophilus xanthoprymnus (Bennett, 1835) . Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1835:90.

TYPE LOCALITY: " Erzurum " [Turkey].

DISTRIBUTION: Transcaucasia (Armenia, possibly Azerbaidzhan), Turkey, Syria, and Israel.

SYNONYMS: schmidti (Satunin, 1908).

COMMENTS: Subgenus Spermophilus (Gromov et al. 1965:237) . Regarded by Ellerman and Morrison-Scott (1951:506) and Corbet (1978c:83) as a synonym of citellus; but see Vasil'eva (1961), Gromov et al. (1965: 237), and Vorontsov and Lyapunova (1970), who provided evidence of specific distinctness.