Giant Blind Mole Rat – Spalax giganteus

Spalax giganteusNehring, 1898

Accepted name, Mammal Species of the World 2005

Once included in S. microphthalmus (Ellerman and Morrison-Scott, 1951), but revised by Topachevskii (1969) as a separate species and listed as such by Pavlinov and Rossolimo (1987, 1998) and Pavlinov et al. (1995a). Geographic range is parapatric with that of S. microphthalmus (Corbet, 1978c). The taxon uralensis has usually been included in S. giganteus (e. g., Gromov and Erbajeva, 1995; Topachevskii, 1969; Vorontsov et al., 1977b), but analyses of cranial dimensions and proportions indicated significant differences between populations from west of the Caspian Sea (giganteus) and the isolated segment in Kazakhstan (uralensis) and prompted the recognition of uralensis as a species (Puzachenko, 1993), an arrangement anticipated by Topachevskii (1969) and accepted by Pavlinov et al. (1995a) and Pavlinov and Rossolimo (1998). Chromosomal traits (2n = 64, FN = 124) documented by Lyapunova et a... [truncated]