The Turkmenistan eyelid gecko or Turkmenian eyelid gecko (''Eublepharis turcmenicus'') is a ground-dwelling
lizard
Lizard is the common name used for all Squamata, squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most Island#Oceanic isla ...
native to
Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan is a landlocked country in Central Asia bordered by Kazakhstan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, east and northeast, Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the south and southwest and the Caspian Sea to the west. Ash ...
and northern
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...
.
[ It inhabits rocky and stony foothills and slopes at elevations up to ]above sea level
Height above mean sea level is a measure of a location's vertical distance (height, elevation or altitude) in reference to a vertical datum based on a historic mean sea level. In geodesy, it is formalized as orthometric height. The zero level ...
. It is oviparous
Oviparous animals are animals that reproduce by depositing fertilized zygotes outside the body (i.e., by laying or spawning) in metabolically independent incubation organs known as eggs, which nurture the embryo into moving offsprings kno ...
, typically laying clutches of two eggs.[ Mainly ]insectivorous
A robber fly eating a hoverfly
An insectivore is a carnivorous animal or plant which eats insects. An alternative term is entomophage, which can also refer to the human practice of eating insects.
The first vertebrate insectivores we ...
, it may also eat smaller vertebrates. Like many other lizards has the ability to shed its tail (autotomy
Autotomy (from the Greek ''auto-'', "self-" and ''tome'', "severing", αὐτοτομία) or 'self-amputation', is the behaviour whereby an animal sheds or discards an appendage, usually as a self-defense mechanism to elude a predator's grasp ...
).
References
*Kaverkin, Y and N. L. Orlov. (1995
Experience of captive breeding of ''Eublepharis turcmenicus'' Darevsky
''Russian Journal of Herpetology''.
Eublepharis
Geckos of Iran
Reptiles of Central Asia
Reptiles described in 1977
Taxa named by Ilya Darevsky
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