Ochotona curzoniae (Hodgson, 1858) . J. Asiat. Soc. Bengal, 1857, 26:207 [1858].

TYPE LOCALITY: "district of Chumbi", Chumbi Valley, Tibet, China .

DISTRIBUTION: Tibetan Plateau; adjacent Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan (China), Sikkim (India) and E Nepal.

STATUS: This species is the focus of widespread control efforts throughout its range, and has been eliminated locally (A. T. Smith et al., 1990).

SYNONYMS: melanostoma (Büchner, 1890) .

COMMENTS: Includes melanostoma, but not seiana from Iran, contra Corbet (1978c:69); see A. T. Smith et al. (1990). Treated as a subspecies of dauurica by Mitchell (1978), but it is considered a distinct species by the Chinese; see Feng and Zheng (1985) and Feng et al. (1986). O. curzoniae and O. dauurica occur in geographic sympatry in Hainan County, Qinghai Province, China, and differ both chromosomally (Vorontsov and Ivanitskaya, 1973) and electrophoretically (Zhou and Xia, 1981).