ИСТИНА

The frog – eyed geckos of the genus Teratoscincus – typical representatives of the desert zone of Central Asia and the Middle East. In the modern sense, this morphologically compact group formed by seven species: T. bedriagai Nikolsky, 1900; T. keyserlingii Strauch, 1863; T. microlepis Nikolsky, 1900; T. przewalskii Strauch 1887; T. roborowskii Bedriaga 1906; T. scincus (Schlegel, 1858) and T. toksunicus Wang, 1989. The validity of the latter taxon is questionable, and some author’ss consider this species as a synonym of T. roborowskii. In the present study, we used a comprehensive analysis of morphological characters and a molecular data that allows us to conclude the following: T. bedriagai – our data (three populations of eastern Iran) shows that they are monotypic species. T. keyserlingii – the level of intraspecific polymorphism is relatively high, however, at this time it is not possible to determinate the taxonomic status of the most populations, and required an additional study. We discovered a new species in central Iran belonging to the cf. keyserlingii group. In addition to the molecular differences in the gene COI, a new species has a number of morphological characteristic features (in press). T. scincus, T. rustamowi and T. keyserlingii have similar genetic distances and can be consider as a full species. However, morphological differences between nominative form and T. keyserlingii significantly greater than in the case of T. rustamowi. Intraspecific structure of T. scincus formed by three major clades (south area, the central part and the north-west). The greatest genetic uniqueness, as it turned out, present on the geckos from south Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Establishment of the taxonomic status of these populations requires an additional research. T. microlepis – researched material (two populations from southern Iran) revealed no significant differences in this species. However, the morphological analysis of several specimens from Pakistan showed some peculiarity of these populations. T. przewalskii – the population from the northwestern China are different from Mongolian population by the number of morphological characters.