Jaculus orientalis Erxleben 1777

Jaculus orientalis Erxleben 1777, Systema Regni Animalis, Vol. 1: 404.

Type Locality: Egypt, in the "mountains separating Egypt from Arabia" (G. M. Allen, 1939:424).

Vernacular Names: Greater Egyptian Jerboa.

Synonyms: Jaculus bipes (Lichtenstein 1823); Jaculus gerboa (Olivier 1800); Jaculus locusta (Illiger 1815); Jaculus mauritanicus (Duvernoy 1841) .

Distribution: Arid or semarid regions of N Africa and Israel, from Morocco (see the range map in Aulagnier and Thévenot, 1986) E through Algeria (Kowalski and Rzebik-Kowalska, 1991), Tunisia (Vesmanis, 1984), and Libya (Ranck, 1968) to Egypt (Osborn and Helmy, 1980), Sinai and S Israel (Mendelssohn and Yom-Tov, 1999; "a narrow strip in northern Negev," G. Shenbrot, in litt., 2003).

Conservation: IUCN – Lower Risk (nt).

Discussion: Jaculus orientalis has been identified from the late Pliocene in Ethiopia (Wesselman, 1984) and Plio-Pleistocene in Kenya (Black and Krishtalka, 1986). For synonyms see Ellerman and Morrison-Scott (1951).