Nannospalax Palmer, 1903

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 753

Nannospalax Palmer, 1903 . Science, n.s., 17:873.

TYPE SPECIES: Spalax kirgisorum Nehring, 1898 (= Spalax ehrenbergi Nehring, 1898 ).

SYNONYMS: Mesospalax, Microspalax (of Mehely, 1909, not Megnin and Trouessart, 1885), Ujhelyiana .

COMMENTS: The species were monographed under the genus Microspalax Mehely, 1909 , by Topachevskii (1969). Mehely's generic name, however, is preoccupied and that is why Nannospalax , as well as Ujhelyiana , were proposed. Nannospalax is differentiated from Spalax by a suite of skeletal and dental traits ( Topachevskii, 1969). Compared with species of Spalax, karyotypes of those in Nannospalax have low diploid and fundamental numbers and exhibit significant interpopulational differences that correlate with biological and ecological distinctions. Such properties have led investigators to suspect that the three entities listed below are superspecies, each made up of separate biological species (Savie and Nevo, 1990).