Trachylepis Fitzinger, 1843

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 : 47

Trachylepis Fitzinger, 1843

A genus formerly included in the collective genus Mabuya . Honda et al. (1999) pointed out the paraphyly of the genus and later Mausfeld et al. (2002) split Mabuya into four genera with the Middle Eastern representatives being placed in the genus Trachylepis together with the African species (Bauer 2003). Nevertheless, as recent phylogenetic studies show, the Middle Eastern species are a monophyletic group deeply divergent from the African Trachylepis and deserve to be separated as an independent genus ( Carranza & Arnold 2003; Mausfeld & Schmitz 2003; Sindaco et al. 2012; Pyron et al. 2013). Traditionally two species were recognized in the Middle East - T. vittata and T. aurata (Linnaeus) , the latter forming three subspecies— T. a. aurata , T. a. transcaucasica Chernov and T. a. septemtaeniata . Moravec et al. (2006) restricted the range of T. aurata to Turkey and adjacent Greek islands and elevated T. a. septemtaeniata from NE Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Transcaucasia, Iraq, Iran, and S Turkmenistan to a species rank. This change is also supported by the degree of genetic divergence between both forms ( Mausfeld & Schmitz 2003). As was also suggested by Moravec et al. (2006), the form transcaucasica distributed from Armenia, Azerbaijan, central and northern Iran to S Turkmenistan could, in fact, represent a subspecies of T. septemtaeniata . However its assignment is still not clear and most authors refer to it as a form of T. aurata ( Faizi & Rastegar-Pouyani 2007; Rastegar-Pouyani & Faizi 2007; Rastegar-Pouyani et al. 2008; Fathinia et al. 2009, 2010). Here we follow Moravec et al. (2006) and Sindaco & Jeremčenko (2008) in recognizing T. s. transcaucasica.