Morphological Study of Hemidactylus Geckos (Squamata:Gekkonidae) from Iran

The four species of Hemidactylus have been reported in Iran as follows: H. persicus, H. robustus, H. flaviviridis and H. romeshkanicus which is endemic to Lorestan province of Iran. In this study, 108 specimens belonging to these species of Hemidactylus were examined morphologically, using 19 metric and six meristic characters. The pairwise analysis of variance showed separation between H. persicus and H. robustus, H. flavivirids and H. robustus is more obvious rather than H. persicus and H. flaviviridis which have a similar body size. Multivariate analyses showed morphological differences among these three species with exception H. romeshkanicus which was found to be indistinguishable from the specimens of H. persicus, especially in the Canonical variates analysis. Additionally, previous study showed presences of high intraspecific variation among populations of H. persicus complex and therefore we could not definitely decide about the taxonomic status of H. romeshkanicus with only one specimen. But we suggest that latter species probably belongs to a local populations inside H. persicus complex.