Dipodillus (Dipodillus) simoni Lataste 1881

Dipodillus (Dipodillus) simoni Lataste 1881, Le Naturaliste (Paris), 3: 499.

Type Locality: Algeria, Oued Magra.

Vernacular Names: Simon's Dipodil.

Synonyms: Dipodillus (Dipodillus) kaiseri (Setzer 1958) .

Distribution: Along the coast of Egypt (west of Nile Delta) and NE Libya, coastal and inland in NW Libya and Tunisia, and high plateau region of the Atlas in Algeria and E Morocco (see Cockrum et al., 1976).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (lc) as Gerbillus simoni .

Discussion: Subgenus Dipodillus . A distinctive species (Lay, 1983; Pavlinov et al., 1990) revised by Cockrum et al. (1976 a) and reviewed by Pavlinov et al. (1990). Regional reviews are available for Egypt (Osborn and Helmy, 1980), Libya (Ranck, 1968), and Algeria (Kowalski and Rzebik-Kowalska, 1991). Although samples from coastal Egypt ( kaiseri) have, on average, slightly longer tails, darker pelage, and smaller auditory bulla than do those from the western portion of the range ( simoni), the variation is clinal east to west, prompting Cockrum et al. (1976 a) to treat all populations as a single species. This interpretation was endorsed by Osborn and Helmy (1980) from their study of Egyptian samples and comparisons with data in the literature, and supports Wassif’s (1956, 1960) earlier conclusion that kaiseri is synonymous with D. simoni . Chromosomal data summarized by Qumsiyeh and Schlitter (1991); karyotype (2n = 60, FN = 72) of Tunisian sample described by Chetoui et al. (2002).