CONTIA MCMAHONI WALL, 1911 Holotype Originally deposited in the Quetta Museum, Pakistan, but later destroyed (Smith, 1943). Sanyal & Talwar (1975) considered one of the syntypes as the lectotype (catalogue number ZSI 16624, collection of the Zoological Survey of India, Calcutta, India). For further discussion see Mahlow et al. (2013). Diagnosis N = 5. 204–238 (x = 214) ventrals; 91–96 (x = 94) subcaudals; ratio of the tail length over total length 30.64–32.00 (x = 31.20); 13/15/13 dorsal scale rows on the anterior, mid, and posterior dorsal body; seven supralabials. Dorsal background colour light brown, body without dorsal pattern but the bases of the anterior dorsal scales are darker than the rest of scales; head colour is a little darker than the body; the ventral surface of the body is uniform whitish. Distribution Distributed across the Suleiman Mountains in central Pakistan (localities indicated by plus symbols 1 to 5 in Fig. 2).

Published as part of Rajabizadeh, Mahdi, Nagy, Zoltán T., Adriaens, Dominique, Avci, Aziz, Masroor, Rafaqat, Schmidtler, Josef, Nazarov, Roman, Esmaeili, Hamid Reza & Christiaens, Joachim, 2016, Alpine-Himalayan orogeny drove correlated morphological, molecular, and ecological diversification in the Persian dwarf snake (Squamata: Serpentes: Eirenis persicus), pp. 878-913 in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 176 on page 904, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5360449