Ophiomorus Duméril & Bibron, 1839

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 : 45

Ophiomorus Duméril & Bibron, 1839

The distribution of this genus is disjunct and divided into three isolated areas: 1) S Balkans and SW Turkey, 2) the Levant, and 3) Iran, S Pakistan and NW India. The Iranian plateau plays a key role in the genus diversity—eight out of eleven species of Ophiomorus occur there with four species being endemic to Iran. Cladistic analysis of morphological characters identified all the eastern species except O. persicus to form a common cluster ( Greer & Wilson 2001). There are no genetic data for any Iranian species; none of them has ever been included in any phylogenetic study. Surprisingly, according to the latest phylogeny of squamates ( Pyron et al. 2013), Ophiomorus is sister to the Central American genus Mesoscincus . There is an undetermined specimen in the MVZ collection (MVZ 234477) from Qeshm Island that may by particularly interesting to investigate.