Until very recently there was only one anecdotal report of this species in the UAE, from western Abu Dhabi Emirate (Gasperetti 1967). The first confirmed records were obtained on 30 October 2015 on the eastern side of Wadi Wurayah National Park (N.P.) in Fujairah Emirate, when an animal was photographed by camera traps set up as part of a monitoring programme (Chreiki et al. 2018). Porcupines were subsequently camera-trapped in November 2015 and again in November 2016, and there was a visual observation by a park ranger in March 2017. Interviews with 26 farm owners and workers elicited a further eight direct reports of sightings all near farms or roads on the eastern side of the National Park (Chreiki et al. 2018) and locals confirmed that the species had been in the area for 30-40 years. The species was also recorded in December 2017 at Mirfa in the Al Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi (R.M. Al Zaabi pers. comm. 2018) and there is another recent record from Barari, Dubai. Subsequent inquiries have revealed a record from 1997 or 1998 of a porcupine feeding after dark at a bag of waste from a small company overnight picnic site in Fujairah (G.R. Feulner pers. comm. 2018). The nearest record of this species in the region is at Hayma on the Jiddat Al Harasis in south-central Oman (Harrison and Bates 1991), about 600 km away. In the Arabian Peninsula, the species occurs in southern Oman, southwest Yemen and western Saudi Arabia as well as the northwest of Arabia and in Iraq (Harrison and Bates 1991). This species has been recorded from Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean through the Middle East to Central Asia, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (Amori et al. 2016).