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.