Asaccus Dixon & Anderson, 1973

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 : 41

Asaccus Dixon & Anderson, 1973

The genus Asaccus is going through a species description boom within its relatively narrow distribution confined to the Mesopotamian Plain ( Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran), Zagros Mountains and the mountains in the east of the Arabian Peninsula ( UAE, Oman). Sindaco and Jeremčenko (2008) in their comprehensive summary listed nine species whereas now there are sixteen species of Asaccus described ( Uetz 2013). Moreover, five of the new species have been described from Iran with the Zagros Mountains being the core of the genus diversity. The only available phylogenetic study is by Papenfuss et al. (2010), who studied seven out of ten species known at that time. Their results show that despite the marked gap in the distribution the East-Arabian and Mesopotamian species are not reciprocally monophyletic, A. montanus from Oman is sister to all the remaining species and there are at least two independent clades in Iran, one represented only by A. nasrullahi , the other by A. griseonotus and A. elisae .