Eliomys melanurus Wagner, 1839

7. Black-tailed Garden Dormouse, Eliomys melanurus Wagner, 1839 View in CoL

(IUCN Red List: LC)

Subspecies: E. m. melanurus Wagner, 1839 .

Distribution: Occurs in rocky areas with vegetation cover and at different elevations; Mesopotamia, middle of Al-Badia, and southwestern regions ( Fig. 11 View FIGURE 11 ).

Previous records: az-Zabadani ( Lortet 1883), Jebel al-Geba north of Al-Qaryatein ( Aharoni 1917), Mount Hermon ( Bodenheimer 1935; Harrison & Bates 1991), Damascus ( Golemansky & Darwish 1993), Palmyra, Halabiyyeh ( Kryštufek & Kraft 1997), Halabiyyeh, Palmyra and Yabroud ( Obuch 2001), Qal’at Sukkara (Shehab et al. 2004), Ain Jum’aa ( Shehab et al. 2009), and Al-Bargasha and Serghaya ( Shehab et al. 2018).

Remarks: The Asian Garden Dormouse has been recorded from Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey ( Harrison & Bates 1991). Shehab et al. (2009) provided a comprehensive description of E. melanurus including its external morphology, illustrations of the skull, phallus and baculum, and updated distribution in Syria with ecological information (e.g., hibernation). It was found also in owl pellets from near Jebel Abd al-Aziz (Shehab et al. 2004), and at several localities in pellets collected from different species of owls ( Obuch 2001).