Barbatula potaninorum Prokofiev, 2007

Chen, Hao, Zhang, Hui, Chen, Yongxia & Freyhof, Jörg, 2019, A review of the Barbatula loaches (Teleostei: Nemacheilidae) from north-eastern China, with the description of four new species, Zootaxa 4565 (1), pp. 1-36 : 12

Barbatula potaninorum Prokofiev, 2007

Materials examined. None

Diagnosis. Barbatula potaninorum is distinguished from all other species of Barbatula in north-eastern China by having 6½ branched dorsal-fin rays (vs. 7½). It is further distinguished by a combination of characters: snout blunt, anterior and posterior nostril widely spaced (vs. closely set in B. nuda ), snout as long as the postorbital head length, upper lip with a shallow median incision (vs. deep in B. nuda and B. gibba ), mental lobe flattened, lower lip with short expansion (vs. absent in B. nuda ), pelvic-fin origin in front of the vertical through the dorsal-fin origin (vs. below in B. nuda ) and body completely covered with scales.

See Table 3 for the character states shown by the different species of Barbatula found in north-eastern China.

Distribution. Only known from Inner Mongolia of China. Prokofiev (2016) did not give an exact type locality or distribution of the species.

Remarks. We treat B. potaninorum as a valid species as it can be distinguished from the other species by the characters given by Prokofiev (2016). The original description of this species was based on a single individual and no exact type locality is given.