to deeply analyze their possible taxonomic placement through Mosasaurus. While his original 1808 hypothesis that the genus was a lizard with affinities to monitor lizards remained the most popular, Cuvier was uncertain, even at the time, about the accuracy of this placement. He simultaneously proposed a number of alternative hypotheses, with one such alternative suggesting that Mosasaurus instead had closer affinities with iguanas due to their shared presence of pterygoid teeth. With the absence of sufficient fossil evidence, researchers during the early and mid-19th century had little to work with. Instead, they primarily relied on stratigraphic associations and Cuvier's 1808 research on the holotype skull. Thus, in-depth research on the placement of Mosasaurus was not undertaken until the discovery of more complete mosasaur fossils during the late 19th century, which reignited research on the placement of mosasaurs among squamates. In a span of about 30 to 40 years during the late 19th to early 20th centuries, paleontologists fiercely debated the issue, which created two major schools of thought: one that supported a monitor lizard relationship and one that supported a closer relationship with snakes. The proposition of a snake relationship was spearheaded by Cope, who first published such a hypothesis in 1869 by proposing that mosasaurs, which he classified under a group called the Pythonomorpha, was the sister group of snakes. Some scientists went as far as to interpret mosasaurs as direct ancestors of snakes. Opponents supporting a relationship with monitor lizards argued that mosasaurs should be placed within the infraorder Anguimorpha, with lower classifications varying from placing mosasaurs within Varanoidea or its sister taxa, or as true monitor lizards within Varanidae. These debates spawned higher taxonomic groups that were erected in attempts to classify the placement of mosasaurs (although not all are compatible). One of these was the Mosasauria, a loosely-defined group erected by Marsh in 1880 but is still used by some researchers today that includes all descendants of the last common ancestor of Mosasaurus and some of its ancestral relatives, including the marine squamates dolichosaurs Dolichosaurus and Coniasaurus and Adriosaurus. In 1923, Charles Lewis Camp published Classification of the Lizards, in which he proposed through the review and rebuttal of previous arguments using his own anatomical observations that all taxa more closely related to Mosasaurus than Dolichosaurus should be classified into a superfamily called the Mosasauroidea, which would be a sister superfamily to the Varanoidea. Camp's take