Varanops Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Varanops was first described in 1911 by paleontologist Samuel Wendell Williston, who initially thought it was just a second species of a related animal called Varanosaurus before giving it its own genus three years later in 1914.
• ✓Although Varanops looks strikingly like a monitor lizard, it belongs to Synapsida, the group that eventually gave rise to mammals, meaning it is actually more closely related to humans than to any living lizard or reptile.
• ✓Varanops lived during the Early Permian Period, roughly 283 to 274 million years ago, which means it was roaming what is now Texas and Oklahoma about 40 million years before the first dinosaurs even appeared on Earth.
• ✓Varanops belongs to the family Varanopidae, a group of synapsids so convincingly lizard-like in body shape that scientists debated for years whether they might actually be true reptiles rather than synapsids, a controversy only resolved through detailed fossil analysis.
• ✓Fossils of Varanops have been recovered from both Texas and Oklahoma, making it one of the few Early Permian synapsids documented from multiple US states, which suggests it had a reasonably wide geographic range across the ancient supercontinent Pangaea.