As far as I am aware, the following list from Wikipedia is correct; however I believe there has been precious little work done on the genus so I suspect that once someone has put the effort in, quite a bit of lumping and splitting may occur. The taxa in bold are held in public collections within Europe, though I suspect some of the others are in private hands.
In addition to these, there are two species lacking a common name, having recently been split from the South African Spiny Mouse - Acomys muzei and Acomys ngurui.
I believe the Asia Minor (A. cilicicus) is also known as the Turkish ?
The Tibesti or Seurat`s is definately kept privately. The Arabian and Egyptian were once very commonly kept, and the Golden (which is not Golden confusingly, but black) is very much like the Egyptian, as is the Mount Kulal in general appearance.
Suspect you have got your wires crossed regarding the Golden Spiny Mouse, as it *is* pretty golden in appearance judging by the ones I saw at Zoo Magdeburg last year!
Asia Minor is indeed the same thing as the Turkish.
Suspect you have got your wires crossed regarding the Golden Spiny Mouse, as it *is* pretty golden in appearance judging by the ones I saw at Zoo Magdeburg last year!
Yes you must be right, I am only going on the fact I was given some in the 80s which were said to be "Golden" at the time, but they were black, which I thought rather strange at the time. But I think this confusion must have been quite widespread because there were many other people keeping these too, which were all said to be "Golden Spiny Mice".
the one thing that has put me off keeping spiny mice is the fact that there is so little info on species and subspecies. Most in private collections are labelled just as 'Spiny mice' with only a few interested in stating the species.
I know of somebody with black/grey spiny mice who also said that they were Egyptian so who really knows?!
