Varanus griseus ( Daudin, 1803 )

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 : 51

Varanus griseus ( Daudin, 1803)

TYPES. Of both the Iranian subspecies not located ( Mertens 1954; Anderson 1999).

TYPE LOCALITY. Egypt .

DISTRIBUTION. North Africa from Western Sahara to Egypt, eastwards through the Arabian Peninsula and Levant, Iraq and S Turkey to Iran, Pakistan, NW India, Afghanistan, and the Central Asian Republics.

DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN. Fig. 151 . Seemingly disjunct distribution caused more probably by a lack of records than by real hiatus in the range. Western part of the range spans across the Mesopotamian Plain, Bushehr, Fars, Esfahan, Qom, Tehran and westernmost Semnan Prov. There are no available distributional data from about 500 km wide longitudinal belt across the central Iranian Plateau and along central Persian Gulf coast. The second part of the range stretches along the Afghan and Pakistani border from Hormozgan and Sistan and Baluchistan to Khorasan Razavi Prov .

HABITAT. A deserticolous species inhabiting a wide variety of habitats from sandy or gravelly plains to stony foothills with sparse vegetation.

REMARKS. The subspecies V. g. caspius Eichwald (type locality: Dardsha Peninsula, eastern coast of the Caspian Sea) inhabits most of Iran. All alleged records of V. g. griseus from Iran are based on juvenile specimens ( Anderson 1999, p. 298; Fathinia et al. 2009) and cannot be considered reliable.

REFERENCES. Mertens (1954, 1959, 1973); Anderson (1999); Kami (2005b).

Figures

FIGURES 146–151. 146. Diplometopon zarudnyi. 147. Uromastyx aegyptia. 148. Uromastyx asmussi. 149. Uromastyx loricata. 150. Varanus bengalensis. 151. Varanus griseus.