The Cape Verde giant skink was first given the specific name Euprepes coctei by French zoologists André Marie Constant Duméril and Gabriel Bibron in 1839.

The holotype was a preserved specimen at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, one of five collected in 1784 by João da Silva Feijó in Ilhéu Branco, taken to Ajuda near Lisbon, and looted by the Napoleonic Army in 1808.

[4] Since Duméril and Bibron ignored the history of the specimen, they listed its origin as "the coast of Africa" and the species remained in obscurity until it was rediscovered in 1873 by Cape Verdean doctor Frederico Hopffer.

[9] It was described as prehensile and powerful, well adapted to climb trees, which surprised 19th century scientists who only knew Cape Verde giant skinks from denuded, arid islets.

[9] The Cape Verde giant skink's long digestive track, abundant and varied helminthic community, and specialized dentition were well suited for a vegetarian diet.

[3] Preserved giant skinks have belly-button slits indicative of viviparous matrotrophy, yet a captive female was documented as laying a clutch of seven eggs over fifteen days in 1891, purely white colored and 1 1/2 inches in diameter.

[3] The "Mindelo" island broke up when sea levels rose at the end of the Pleistocene, fragmenting the Cape Verde giant skink's population.

Denudation increased after the Portuguese arrived in 1461, cut down the remaining tamarisk trees for firewood and construction, and introduced goats that ate the other vegetation.

Examined owl pellets in Santa Luzia commonly contain skink bones before settlement, but lack any more recent than 1673, evidencing that they had become very rare in the island by then.

[9] According to an elderly resident interviewed by Hopffer, around 1833 a drought-induced famine struck Cape Verde and the government cut expenses by marooning thirty prisoners from Santo Antão in Branco, who survived by eating fish and skinks.

In 1890, the wildlife traffickers Thomas Castle and José Oliveira captured up to two hundred skinks in Branco and sold them in England, Germany, and Austria.

The Italian herpetologist Mario Giacinto Peracca bought 40 skinks in London and held them for several years in his vivariums of Chivasso near Turin, where he made important observations on the reproduction and nutrition of the species.

In 1915, an official of the Cape Verde colony wrote the Museum of Lisbon to inform that fishermen from Santo Antão had released some dogs in Raso and that they had quickly killed all skinks on the islet.

Some animals survived in the possession of German and Austro-Hungarian zoos and collectionists even with the additional difficulties brought by World War I and the interwar period, until the species was declared extinct in 1940.