Calomyscus Thomas, 1905

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 : 535

Calomyscus Thomas, 1905 . Abstr. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1905(24):23.

TYPE SPECIES: Calomyscus bailwardi Thomas, 1905 .

COMMENTS: Calomyscus has been considered monotypic ( Ellerman and Morrison-Scott, 1951; Peshev, 1991). However, Vorontsov et al. (1979), in a comprehensive revision of the genus, treated most of the subspecies of C. bailwardi as distinct species, an arrangement that should be tested with additional data.

The population from Syria was discovered only recently (see Peshev, 1991), indicating that the geographic ranges of living species have yet to be defined. The modern range of the genus is a remnant of a broader distribution that in the Tertiary extended as far west as Spain (see Agusti, 1989, and references therein).