on the subject virtually ended the snake-monitor lizard debate for approximately 70 years, with nearly all subsequent studies supporting a relationship with monitor lizards. However, many studies continued to support going further than Camp in the monitor lizard relationship, placing mosasaurs within the Varanoidea. The debate was reignited with the publication of a 1997 cladistical study by Michael S. Y. Lee, which recovered the Mosasauroidea as a sister taxon to the snake suborder Serpentes and resurrected the argument for a snake relationship. Prior, there had never been a modern phylogenetic study specifically testing the relationships between mosasaurs or snakes. Lee also resurrected the defunct Pythonomorpha and redefined it to unify the Mosasauroidea and Serpentes under one clade. Multiple subsequent studies conducted by scientists such as Lee, Caldwell, and Alessandro Palci refined this hypothesis. In some studies, the Mosasauria clade was used to represent mosasaurs. However, there still remained little consensus. For example, a large-scale 2008 phylogenetic study by paleontologist Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History recovered the Mosasauria clade in a polytomy, or a clade with unresolved relationships, with monitor lizards and beaded lizards; and a 2012 study by Gauthier et al. recovered Mosasauria as a clade basal to both monitor lizards and snakes. With the advent of molecular genetics during the 2010s, some scientists argued for the combining of molecular and morphological data to examine relationships between mosasaurs and living squamates. An early study was Lee (2009), which based on nuclear and mitochondrial DNA in living squamates and morphological data recovered mosasaurs as a stem group to snakes, which some later authors interpreted as placement of snakes within the Mosasauria clade itself. However, a 2010 study by Weins et al. attempted to replicate Lee (2009) using a larger dataset but instead yielded results that recovered the Mosasauria as a sister clade to the monitor lizards. The frequent discrepancies are due to the high prevalence of convergent evolution in squamates, which creates much room for interpreting molecular and morphological data; many of these studies had results that often contradicted each other, for example in completely different phylogenetic results by simply adding more datasets or varying which taxa are represented, which resulted in various conflicts creating even more uncertainty. Due to this, some scientists argued that a molecular perspective should be abandoned entirely. Nevertheless, other scientists have attempted to resolve these problems. One approach was utilized by a