Chalcides Laurenti, 1768

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 : 44

Chalcides Laurenti, 1768

Chalcides ocellatus ( Forskål, 1775)

TYPE. Not located.

TYPE LOCALITY. Egypt.

DISTRIBUTION. N Africa from Western Sahara through Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and south to Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Isolated populations are scattered throughout the central Sahara, some Mediterranean Islands (Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus), coastal Greece and S Turkey, Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf coast and Makran coast in W Pakistan, Kopet Dagh range in Turkmenistan.

DISTRIBUTION IN IRAN. Fig. 129 . Strictly coastal range along the Persian Gulf shores (Bushehr, Hormozgan, Sistan and Baluchistan Prov. ) .

HABITAT. Sandy or loose-soil habitats, usually found under debris close to human habitations, particularly in the eastern part of the range including Iran.

REMARKS. The coastal character of the distribution in the eastern part of the range is believed to be a result of human-mediated transport. This assumption is also supported by morphology as the animals from SW Asia, Iraq, Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan are morphologically very similar to those from N Egypt, the place of supposed origin of the eastern populations ( Carranza et al. 2008).

REFERENCES. Pasteur (1981); Anderson (1999); Carranza et al. (2008); Kornilios et al. (2010); Lavin & Papenfuss (2012).

Figures

FIGURES 128–133. 128. Ablepharus pannonicus. 129. Chalcides ocellatus. 130. Eumeces schneiderii. Red symbols represent records of E. s. princeps, blue of E. s. zarudnyi and blue square denotes its type locality, violet question mark indicates dubious data for E. blythianus. 131. Eurylepis taeniolatus. 132. Ophiomorus blanfordii. 133. Ophiomorus brevipes.