Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) pumilio (Kerr 1792)

[Alactagulus] pumilio Kerr 1792, in: Linnaeus, Anim. Kingdom: 275.

Type Locality: Kazakhstan, between Caspian Sea and Irtysh River. Pavlinov and Rossolimo (1987) listed Kirghiz Steppe, "the old Russian name for Central Kazakhstan " (G. Shenbrot, in litt., 2003) as the type locality for this species.

Vernacular Names: Dwarf Fat-tailed Jerboa.

Synonyms: Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) acontion (Pallas 1811); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) aralensis (Ognev 1948); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) brachyotis (Ostrouchov 1889); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) dinniki (Satunin 1920); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) minor (Pallas 1779); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) minutus (Blainville 1817); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) pallidus (Vinogradov 1933); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) potanini (Vinogradov 1926); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) pumilio (Kerr 1792); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) pygmaea (Pallas 1779); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) tanaiticus (Ognev 1948); Pygeretmus (Alactagulus) turcomanus (Heptner and Samorodov 1939) .

Distribution: From the Don River (Russia) through Kazakhstan to the Irtysh River (Kuznetsov, 1965; Sludskii, 1977), south to NE Iran (Lay, 1967); E to S Mongolia (Bannikov, 1954); China: W Nei Mongol (Ma et al., 1987), N Xinjiang (Chen and Wang, 1985; Ma et al., 1987), Gansu, and Ningxia (Wang, 2003; Chinese range mapped in Zhang et al., 1997).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc).

Discussion: Subgenus Alactagulus (see Pavlinov and Rossolimo, 1987). The name pygmaeus is preoccupied and is an invalid junior synonym of pumilio, (Corbet, 1978 c; Ellerman and Morrison-Scott, 1951). Reviewed by Ognev (1963 b) and Shenbrot et al. (1995). Reviewed also by Gromov and Erbajeva (1995) who retained Alactagulus as the genus, not subgenus, for pumilio . For synonyms see Ellerman and Morrison-Scott (1951), Corbet, (1978c), and Shenbrot et al. (1995).