Eremias persica Blanford, 1874

Šmíd, Jiří, Moravec, Jiří, Kodym, Petr, Kratochvíl, Lukáš, Yousefkhani, Seyyed Saeed Hosseinian, Rastegar-Pouyani, Eskandar & Frynta, Daniel, 2014, Annotated checklist and distribution of the lizards of Iran, Zootaxa 3855 (1), pp. 1-97 : 36

Eremias persica Blanford, 1874

LECTOTYPE. BMNH 1946.8.7.32, designated by Szczerbak (1974), for comments see Bauer & Günther (1995).

TYPE LOCALITY. “...omnibus fere planitiebus Persicis” [= almost all Persian lowlands]; restricted by Smith (1935) to near Esfahan, Esfahan Prov., Iran .

DISTRIBUTION. S Azerbaijan, most of Iran, S Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and W Pakistan.

DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN. Fig. 103 . The whole central plateau south of the Alborz Mts. and including the Zagros. There are no records from the central desert systems Dasht-e Lut and Dasht-e Kavir which are apparently avoided by this species.

HABITAT. Open plains and slopes with sparse grassy vegetation, usually associated with gravel surfaces but can be found also on mixed sand and gravel or silt and gravel.

REMARKS. Eremias persica is formed by five geographically isolated clades in Iran that diverged consecutively 6–10 Mya, which corresponds with the uplift and subsequent aridization of the Iranian plateau ( Rastegar-Pouyani et al. 2010b). The basal lineage of the radiation contains a central Zagros population of E. persica together with E. montana and an unnamed form from NW Iran thus rendering E. persica paraphyletic. Eremias nigrolateralis Rastegar-Pouyani & Nilson , a species described principally on the basis of dorsal colour pattern differences, was found to be nested within E. persica and was synonymized with it ( Rastegar-Pouyani et al. 2010b). In order to settle the taxonomy of this species complex the authors propose to raise four E. persica clades (from the Zabol area, central Zagros, Tehran and Qazvin area, and Ardabil Prov.) to species ranks and two (from the southern Zagros and Golestan Prov.) to subspecies ranks. The population from the central Zagros may be similar to the undescribed species mentioned by Frynta et al. (1997).

REFERENCES. Szczerbak (1974); Rastegar-Pouyani & Nilson (1997); Anderson (1999); Rastegar-Pouyani et al. (2010b).

Figures

FIGURES 98–103. 98. Eremias lineolata. 99. Eremias montana. 100. Eremias nigrocellata. 101. Eremias nova. 102. Eremias papenfussi. 103. Eremias persica.