Iranolacerta brandtii (de Filippi, 1863)

HOLOTYPE. MZUT R2702.

TYPE LOCALITY. Basminsk [= Basmenj], East Azerbaijan Prov. Iran.

DISTRIBUTION. NW Iran and probably southern Azerbaijan from where Boulenger (1920) provided a single record. DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN. Fig. 108. NW of the country E of the Urmia Lake (East Azerbaijan, Kordestan, Ardabil, and Gilan Prov.). Isolated populations formerly treated as I. brandtii esfahanica (Nilson, Rastegar-Pouyani, Rastegar-Pouyani & Andrén) occur in Esfahan and Chahar Mahal and Bakhtiari Prov .

HABITAT. Dry stream gullies, farmland margins, sandy and clayey hillsides with predominant Euphorbia vegetation. The Esfahan populations inhabit alpine meadows at 3000 to 3200 m altitude (Nilson et al. 2003).

REMARKS. Nilson et al. (2003) described the populations in the central Zagros isolated by a hiatus of about 500 km from the populations in NW Iran as a distinct subspecies, I. b. esfahanica. However, genetic study of all Iranian Iranolacerta taxa revealed that despite the large geographical gap, I. b. esfahanica is nested within I. b. brandtii and although not expressed explicitly by the authors themselves it should be considered its younger synonym (Ahmadzadeh et al. 2013b).

REFERENCES. Lantz & Cyrén (1939); Böhme (1993); in den Bosch (1996); Anderson (1999); Olmo et al. (2001a,b); Nilson et al. (2003); Arnold et al. (2007); Rajabizadeh et al. (2010c); Rezazadeh et al. (2010); Hosseinian Yousefkhani et al. (2012d); Ahmadzadeh et al. (2013b).