Each hind foot has only three toes, but the metatarsals are not fused to form a cannon bone. There are tufts of hair beneath the toes. The external ears are short, but the auditory bullae are greatly inflated. The upper incisor teeth are not grooved. There is a small premolar on each side of the upper jaw.
Females have eight mammae.
Its burrows are up to three meters in length. In the Zaysan Depression in extreme eastern Kazakh S.S.R. there are two consecutive breeding peaks in the period from May to July. Average litter size is about 2.7 young. The Soviet Union classifies S. crassicauda and S. heptneri as rare. The Johns Hopkins University Press.