Eremias Fitzinger, 1834

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 : 32

Eremias Fitzinger, 1834

A species-rich genus containing currently 35 species ( Uetz 2013). The distribution spans from E Europe to E China and Korea, most species occur in Central Asia, China, and on the Iranian Plateau. The genus is traditionally divided into five subgenera as proposed by Szczerbak (1974): Eremias , Ommateremias, Pareremias , Rhabderemias , Scapteira . This division is supported by the hemipenial morphology ( Arnold 1986b), but species assignment to individual subgenera remains inconsistent ( Arnold 1986b; Anderson 1999; Guo et al. 2011). In addition, Scapteira and Rhabderemias were reconstructed as polyphyletic ( Guo et al. 2011). Many phylogenetic studies failed to find sister group to Eremias . The genus was recognized as a part of a clade containing the Palearctic genera Acanthodactylus , Mesalina , Omanosaura and Ophisops and the Sub-Saharan Adolfus and Holaspis on the basis of both morphological and genetic data ( Arnold 1989; Mayer & Pavlicev 2007; Hipsley et al. 2009). Latest phylogeny of all squamate reptiles ( Pyron et al. 2013) recovered Eremias as a sister to the South African lacertids.