Rhynchocalamus melanocephalus (Jan, 1862)

Keywords., John Mulder, 2019, Annotated checklist of the herpetofauna (Amphibia, Reptilia) of Mount Ararat and surroundings, Amphibian & Reptile Conservation (e 175) 13 (1), pp. 162-172 : 169-170

Rhynchocalamus melanocephalus (Jan, 1862) Black-headed Ground Snake

The Black-headed Ground Snake occurs in nearby Armenia on mountain slopes bordering the Aras Valley in Yerevan and Ararat ( Arakelyan et al. 2011) .

The mentioning by both Kamali (2017) and Rajabizadeh (2017) of Dolichophis jugularis , next to Dolichophis schmidti , in Iran directly bordering the Ararat region must be erroneous.

During the publication of this checklist, it became obvi- ous that a paper was going to be published on more or less the same subject. At the Fourth International Symposium Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark in October 2017 an oral presentation was given, from which a published text became available in October 2018 ( Yıldız et al. 2018).

A comparison of the results is briefly treated here. As a result of a different scope of area (more strictly around the mountain) their list is of course shorter.

The literature search is quite limited and several classic publications of well-known herpetologists treating herpetological distribution in Turkey are not included, like Méhely (1894), Mertens (1952), Eiselt and Baran (1970), Clark and Clark (1973) and Baran (1976, 1977a,b, 1980). Also, other informative sources like Flärdh (1983), Franzen and Sigg (1989), Norström (1990) and Teynié (1991) are not incorporated. This resulted in an incomplete view of the known distribution and dates of first publication and, even considering the different scope of area, the lack of several species, i.e., Mediodactylus kotschyi , Lacerta media , Eirenis modestus , Eirenis punctatolineatus , and Elaphe sauromates , all of which occur within their scope of area.

Species affiliation of the local Toad Head Agama is still not resolved sufficiently. It is given as Phrynocephalus horvathi by them and as P. helioscopus here (following The Reptile Database), but undoubtedly the same taxon is intended. The Heremites species in the region is treated by them as the species auratus, while here it is presented as septemtaeniatus , the latter according to Bahmani et al. (2017).

Acknowledgements.—Jaap van Wingerde is thanked for his help in obtaining some hard to get references and Wolfgang Wüster for critically reviewing the text.