- Her ancestry (Egyptian) is weirdly out of place for 19th century Latvia.
- Her infirm and bizarre appearance.
- Her ability to bring curses on those who cross her.
- It is small (about six to ten inches) and possesses an extremely toxic venom with no known antidote.
- It has long hind legs for leaping at its prey, mostly insects and small vertebrates.
- It feeds partly on blood, biting their victims and drinking the blood that flows out in the manner of a vampire bat or oxpecker.
Its new world location means it can't be a varanid, and its small size and active lifestyle means it's not a member of the Gila monster or Mexican beaded lizard group either. So what group of lizards does the yellow-spotted lizard belong to? Well, there are two clades of venomous lizards in real life, not counting snakes— the monitor lizards and the beaded lizards. Both of these belong to the order Anguimorpha, but they actually aren't very closely related. The beaded lizards are part of a clade— the Neoanguimorpha— that is also considered to include the alligator lizards and glass lizards. Since these lizards share a common ancestry with the beaded lizards, and more distantly with the monitor lizards, it's likely that they were ancestrally venomous.
What does this have to do with the fictional yellow-spotted lizard? Everything. In real life, the matter of whether the common ancestor of anguimorph lizards was venomous is conjectural. But the yellow-spotted lizard, with its venomous bite, New World distribution, and fairly unspecialized body plan, fits nicely into this idea. In other words, the yellow-spotted lizard is a basal anguimorph.
