Phrynocephalus persicus de Filippi, 1863

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 : 11

Phrynocephalus persicus de Filippi, 1863

LECTOTYPE. ZISP 8844 ; Neotype ZISP 5544.1 (P. p. horvathi ), both designated by Melnikov et al. (2013) .

TYPE LOCALITY. “Campagne deserte dall'Armenia fino a Teheran” [along the route between Armenia and Tehran], Iran. For discussion on the type locality, see Melnikov et al. (2013) .

DISTRIBUTION. From the Caucasus (extreme E Anatolia, Armenia, Georgia) SE into Iran.

DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN. Fig. 18 . Along the Zagros range from West Azerbaijan and Ardabil south-eastwards up to Fars Prov.

HABITAT. Open gravel or stony plains with scattered bushes, desert steppe with sparse vegetation up to 2700 m a.s.l. ( Anderson 1999).

REMARKS. The taxon horvathi is considered a subspecies of P. persicus based on genetic analyses ( Solovyeva et al. 2011; see remarks by P. helioscopus ). The record from Na`imabad, Semnan Prov. by Nikolsky (1907) is doubtful. Material from S Esfahan and N Fars Prov. requires redetermination due to recent description of P. ananjevae , a species potentially present in these areas.

REFERENCES. Anderson (1999); Sindaco et al. (2000); Melnikov et al. (2008, 2013); Rezazadeh et al. (2010); Arakelyan et al. (2011); Solovyeva et al. (2011).

Figures

FIGURES 14–19. 14. Phrynocephalus helioscopus. 15. Phrynocephalus maculatus. 16. Phrynocephalus mystaceus. 17. Phrynocephalus ornatus. Blue square denotes the type locality for P. o. vindumi. 18. Phrynocephalus persicus. 19. Phrynocephalus scutellatus.