Trapelus Cuvier, 1816

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 : 12

Trapelus Cuvier, 1816

Trapelus agilis ( Olivier, 1804)

SYNTYPES. MNHN 5708 , MNHN 1994.1178 (ex. MNHNP 5708 A) ; Holotype GNHM Re. ex. 5224 (T. a. khuzistanensis) ; Holotype SMF 63258 (T. a. pakistanensis) .

TYPE LOCALITY. Neighbourhood of Baghdad, Iraq. Rastegar-Pouyani (1999a) designated the east-central regions of the central Iranian Plateau, about 110 km SE of Esfahan city, as the ‘terra typica designata’ because, as he claimed, there have been no genuine records of T. agilis from Iraq. But since the syntypes are still extant and bear a precise locality that cannot be rejected or modified, Ananjeva et al. (2013) declared his designation as invalid and retained the original type as it appears in Olivier’s (1804) description.

DISTRIBUTION. Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and NW India.

DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN. Fig. 20 . Across all Iran except the NW part of the Zagros. There are three recognized subspecies, two of which occur in Iran: the nominotypical one from most of Iran, SW Pakistan and Afghanistan; T. a. khuzistanensis from the Mesopotamian plain in SW Iran and adjoining areas; and T. a. pakistanensis from SE Pakistan and NW India ( Rastegar-Pouyani 1999a, b).

HABITAT. Flat, open plains and semideserts of clay or gravel substrate with scattered shrubs or vegetation-covered mounds. Although not a vertical climber like Laudakia , it climbs readily on shrubs, rocks and rock piles to use them as observation posts. Observed to retreat into shallow burrows.

REMARKS. Rastegar-Pouyani (1999a) synonymized T. a. isolepis with T. a. agilis . The distribution of T. a. khuzistanensis is supposed to be restricted to Khuzestan and Bushehr Prov. ( Rastegar-Pouyani 1999b), however, exact boundary between this and the nominotypical subspecies has not been studied in details yet.

REFERENCES. Blanford (1881); Rastegar-Pouyani (1998a, b; 2005); Anderson (1999); Macey & Ananjeva (2004); Ananjeva et al. (2006, 2013).

Figures

FIGURES 20–25. 20. Trapelus agilis. Blue square denotes the type locality for T. a. khuzistanensis, dashed line delimits approximate boundary between this and the nominotypical subspecies. 21. Trapelus persicus. 22. Trapelus ruderatus. 23. Trapelus sanguinolentus. 24. Anguis colchica. 25. Pseudopus apodus.