Mesocricetus brandii (Nehring, 1898) . Zool. Anz., 21:331.

TYPE LOCALITY: Georgia, near Tbilisi .

DISTRIBUTION: Anatolian Turkey, south into Israel, Lebanon, Syria, N Iraq, NW Iran, N Transcaucasia, and Kurdistan.

SYNONYMS: koenigi .

COMMENTS: Corbet (1978c) included brandii in M. auratus but acknowledged that it might be a separate species, as it is treated by Niethammer (1982a, c) and Pavlinov and Rossolimo (1987). However, M. brandii was earlier revised by Lyman and O'Brien (1977), who presented morphological, chromosomal, and breeding evidence supporting its specific status, and also provided distributional, ecological, and husbandry information. Additional chromosomal data were documented by Fang and Jagiello (In Press).