Question: What are the closest living relatives of the family of lizards that includes the species Varanus komodoensis?
Context: Heloderma, the only genus of the family Helodermatidae, consists of venomous lizards native to the southwestern United States, Mexico, and as far south as Guatemala.  It includes five separate species, with two subspecies.  Their closest living relatives are the anguid lizards. The Varanidae (varans) are a family of lizards of the superfamily Varanoidea.  The family, a group of carnivorous and frugivorous lizards, includes the extinct Megalania (the largest known lizard), the Komodo dragon (the largest living lizard), and the crocodile monitor.  The Varanidae contain the living genus "Varanus" and a number of extinct taxa.  Their closest living relatives are the anguid and helodermatid lizards. Paramacellodidae is an extinct family of scincomorph lizards that first appeared in the Middle Jurassic around 170 million years ago (Ma) and became extinct in the Early Cretaceous about 100 Ma.  It was one of the earliest groups of lizards to have undergone an evolutionary radiation, with members found across the supercontinent Laurasia.  The phylogenetic relationships and constituent species of Paramacellodidae are uncertain.  Many studies regard it to be closely related to Scincoidea, a large group that includes skinks and their closest extinct relatives, and possibly also to Cordyoidea, a group that includes spinytail lizards and relatives.  Like modern skinks, paramacelloidids had rectangular bony plates called osteoderms covering most of their bodies, including their backs, undersides, and tails.  They also had short and robust limbs. Pinnipeds ( ) (from Latin "pinna" "fin" and "pes, pedis" "foot"), commonly known as seals, are a widely distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin-footed, semiaquatic marine mammals.  They comprise the extant families Odobenidae (whose only living member is the walrus), Otariidae (the eared seals: sea lions and fur seals), and Phocidae (the earless seals, or true seals).  There are 33 extant species of pinnipeds, and more than 50 extinct species have been described from fossils.  While seals were historically thought to have descended from two ancestral lines, molecular evidence supports them as a monophyletic lineage (descended from one ancestral line).  Pinnipeds belong to the order Carnivora and their closest living relatives are bears and musteloids (weasels, raccoons, skunks, and red pandas), having diverged about 50 million years ago. The Komodo Biosphere Reserve and National Park is situated between Flores and Sumbawa in Indonesia.  It is renowned for its population of about 5,000 giant lizards, called 'Komodo dragons' ("Varanus komodoensis").  They exist nowhere else in the world and are of significant interest to scientists studying the theory of evolution. The choanoflagellates are a group of free-living unicellular and colonial flagellate eukaryotes considered to be the closest living relatives of the animals. Choanoflagellates are collared flagellates having a funnel shaped collar of interconnected microvilli at the base of a flagellum.  Choanoflagellates are capable of both asexual and sexual reproduction.  They have a distinctive cell morphology characterized by an ovoid or spherical cell body 3–10 µm in diameter with a single apical flagellum surrounded by a collar of 30–40 microvilli (see figure).  Movement of the flagellum creates water currents that can propel free-swimming choanoflagellates through the water column and trap bacteria and detritus against the collar of microvilli, where these foodstuffs are engulfed.  This feeding provides a critical link within the global carbon cycle, linking trophic levels.  In addition to their critical ecological roles, choanoflagellates are of particular interest to evolutionary biologists studying the origins of multicellularity in animals.  As the closest living relatives of animals, choanoflagellates serve as a useful model for reconstructions of the last unicellular ancestor of animals. Gekkonomorpha is a clade of lizards that includes geckos and their closest relatives.  Although it was first named in 1900, Gekkonomorpha was not widely used as a formal taxon until it was given a phylogenetic definition in the 1990s.  Under this definition, Gekkonomorpha is a stem-based taxon containing the node-based taxon Gekkota, the group that includes the last common ancestor of all living geckos and its descendants.  The extent of Gekkonomorpha beyond gekkotans differs between studies.  For example, Lee (1998) defined Gekkonomorpha in such a way that it included not only Gekkota but the legless amphisbaenian and dibamid lizards as well.  The phylogenetic analysis of Conrad (2008), which did not support a close relationship between geckos and legless lizards, used Gekkonomorpha in a much more restrictive sense so that it included only Gekkota and a few extinct lizards more closely related to Gekkota than to any other living group of lizards (making them "stem" gekkotans).  Some of the most recent phylogenetic analyses suggest that the extinct lizards "Gobekko" and "Parviraptor" may be stem gekkotans, although other analyses find that "Gobekko" may instead be within Gekkota and "Parviraptor" outside Gekkonomorpha. Chikilidae is a family of Indian caecilians, the 10th and most recent (2012) family of caecilians (legless amphibians) to be identified, although the type species, "Chikila fulleri" (formerly "Herpele fulleri") was first described in 1904.  The discovery that this was a separate lineage resulted from genetic analyses of specimens collected during about 250 soil-digging expeditions over five years that covered every Northeast Indian state.  A team of biologists led by University of Delhi herpetologist Sathyabhama Das Biju described the family as representing as many as seven species apparently endemic to the region.  In September 2012, some of these species were also found in Lawachara National Park in the Sylhet region of northeastern Bangladesh.  The family's lineage is believed to have originated in Africa, where their closest living relatives are found. Pieter Antonie Ouwens (14 February 1849, Amsterdam – 5 March 1922, Buitenzorg) was a Dutch scientist and Director of the Java Zoological Museum and Botanical Gardens.  He is best known for writing the first formal description of the Komodo dragon ("Varanus komodoensis") in 1912. The Komodo dragon ("Varanus komodoensis"), also known as the Komodo monitor, is a large species of lizard found in the Indonesian islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores, Gili Motang, and Padar.  A member of the monitor lizard family Varanidae, it is the largest living species of lizard, growing to a maximum length of 3 m in rare cases and weighing up to approximately 70 kg .
Answer: the anguid and helodermatid lizards.