[2] He named it in honour of the army officer and naturalist John Ernest Buttery Hotson, who collected plants and mammal specimens in Baluchistan during the period 1915 to 1920.

[3] Hotson's jerboa is native to Pakistan, Afghanistan and eastern Iran, at altitudes between 200 and 1,500 m (656 and 4,921 ft) above sea level.

[1] Hotson's jerboa is a nocturnal, solitary rodent and digs long tunnels in hard ground in which to live.

This jerboa feeds on seeds and such desert plants as Artemisia aucheri, Anabasis aphylla and Peganum harmala; it stores pieces of stem and leaf in storage chambers inside the burrow.

The population trend is unknown, but no particular threats to the animal have been detected and its habitat is of too poor quality to be worth taking under cultivation.