First confirmed record of Père David’s mole, Talpa davidiana (Mammalia: Eulipotyphla), from Lebanon: molecular evidence for a southward range extension

Abstract

The genus Talpa Linnaeus, 1758 comprises fossorial mammals with a complex taxonomic history in the Near East. Among these, Père David’s mole, Talpa davidiana (Milne-Edwards, 1884), is one of the most enigmatic species, with a distribution previously confirmed only from southeastern Anatolia. This study reports the first confirmed recent record of T. davidiana from Lebanon, discovered at an elevation of 1,696 m in the karstic Fnaidek Mountain. A male specimen was examined using both morphological and molecular methods. Morphological analysis revealed a dental formula of 3/3, 1/1, 3/3, 3/3 (40 teeth), highlighting intraspecific dental variation within the species group. Phylogenetic analysis based on mitochondrial cytochrome b ( cytb ) sequences unequivocally nested the Lebanese specimen within the nominotypical T. davidiana davidiana clade, showing high similarity (>99 %) to populations from southeastern Türkiye. This discovery extends the known recent range of the species southwards by approximately 400 km, bridging a significant geographic gap between Anatolian populations and Late Pleistocene fossil records in the southern Levant. Our findings suggest that T. davidiana maintains a continuous, though likely fragmented, distribution along the high-altitude Levantine mountain corridor, which may have served as a humid refugium.