Credit: Mark Witton
In life he was a ravenous take no prisoners monster of metal. Well except for the metal part that describes newly named Lemmysuchus obtusidens, who ruled the waters around modern-day Britain and France around 164 million years ago during the Middle Jurassic Period. In its time the fearsome dyno-croc with large blunt teeth would have been one of the biggest coastal predators at 19 ft. long, with a skull measuring just over a meter.
In 1909, researchers dug up a bunch of bones in a clay pit near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, England and apparently had mistakenly categorized these particular fossils among a variety of bones as a different kind of sea crocodile. Among the group of bones found many were of Steneosaurus leedsi, which was a teleosaurid relative of Lemmysuchus and that was where the mistake in classification was made.
Recently, an international group of scientists published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, reviewing the fragmentary skeleton at the Natural History Museum in London realized the bones had been wrongly classified since the original finding. While its close relatives had longer snouts and thinner teeth for catching fish, Lemmysuchus, or “Lemmy’s crocodile had a broad snout and large blunt teeth evolved for crushing shelled prey such as turtles. Natural History Museum curator Lorna Steel, a co-author on the study who suggested the naming, said in a press release, “although Lemmy passed away at the end of 2015, we’d like to think that he would have raised a glass to Lemmysuchus, one of the nastiest sea creatures to have ever inhabited the Earth.”
We leave you with the Motörhead classic: Ace Of Spades
