Mediodactylus russowii ( Strauch, 1887 )

Šmíd, Jiří, Moravec, Jiří, Kodym, Petr, Kratochvíl, Lukáš, Yousefkhani, Seyyed Saeed Hosseinian, Rastegar-Pouyani, Eskandar & Frynta, Daniel, 2014, Annotated checklist and distribution of the lizards of Iran, Zootaxa 3855 (1), pp. 1-97 : 22

Mediodactylus russowii ( Strauch, 1887)

LECTOTYPE. ZIL 3658; Lectotype ZIL 9334a ( M. r. zarudnyi ), both designated by Szczerbak & Golubev (1986).

TYPE LOCALITY. Originally Novo-Aleksandorvsk, Chodschent, Mangyschlak, Murza-Robat, Mohal-tau, Tschimkent, Tschinaz, des. Golodnaja, Utsch-Kurgan ad Naryn, Chark-Ukjur (ex. Nikolsky (1915)). Restricted to Nowo-Aleksandrowsk by Mertens & Wermuth (1960); further restricted to “ruins of old fortress at Novo-Aleksandrovskoye” by Szczerbak & Golubev (1986) who also provide a detailed discussion on the type locality.

DISTRIBUTION. S Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, NE Iran, China.

DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN. Fig. 52 . Eastern and northeastern Iran; new localities were recently published by Mahroo et al. (2013).

HABITAT. Restricted to flatland desert and semidesert areas where it lives on tree trunks, cliffs in river and ravine plains, under rocks and on walls of ruined and inhabited buildings made of clay and stone.

REMARKS. Eastern Iran is inhabited by the subspecies M. r. zarudnyi (Nikolsky) . According to the latest phylogenetic studies ( Gamble et al. 2012; Pyron et al. 2013), M. russowii together with its sister species, M. spinicauda , form a group isolated from other Mediodactylus and nested closer to a clade of Pseudoceramodactylus , Tropiocolotes , and Stenodactylus thus rendering the genus Mediodactylus paraphyletic.

REFERENCES. Szczerbak & Golubev (1986, 1996); Anderson (1999); Gamble et al. (2012); Bauer et al. (2013); Mahroo et al. (2013).

Figures

FIGURES 50–55. 50. Mediodactylus heteropholis. 51. Mediodactylus ilamensis. 52. Mediodactylus russowii. Blue square denotes the type locality for M. r. zarudnyi. 53. Mediodactylus sagittifer. 54. Mediodactylus spinicauda. 55. Mediodactylus stevenandersoni.