Ellobius Fischer, 1814 . Zoognosia, 3:72.

TYPE SPECIES: Mus talpinus Pallas, 1770 .

SYNONYMS: Afganomys, Afghanomys, Chthonergus, Lemmomys, Myospalax (of Blyth, 1846, not Laxmann, 1769, or Hermann, 1783).

COMMENTS: Gromov and Polyakov (1977) excluded Ellobius from arvicolines, and Pavlinov and Rossolimo (1987) viewed the Ellobiini as Cricetidae incertae sedis, questioning whether it belonged in Arvicolinae or Cricetinae . Most workers, however, have recognized Ellobius, albeit highly specialized and unusual, as the only extant member of the tribe Ellobiini of Arvicolinae (Corbet, 1978c; Hooper and Hart, 1962; Kretzoi, 1969; Topachevskii and Rekovets, 1982). Topachevskii and Rekovets (1982) interpreted relationships and morhological trends in diversification within the genus from the late Pliocene to Recent. The present range of Ellobius is only part of a wider distribution that once embraced Israel and North Africa in the middle to late Pleistocene (Jaeger, 1988). Ultrastructure, meiotic behavior, and evolution of sex chromosomes in the genus are discussed by Kolomiets et al. (1991). Two subgenera are recognized, Ellobius and Afganomys; Zagorodnyuk (1990) listed the latter as a genus.