During the Jurassic Period, both the land and seas of what would become Europe
were terrorized by a crocodile-like predator named Lemmysuchus.
Named after the late rockstar Lemmy,
despite its similar appearance, Lemmysuchus was not a true crocodilian.
Instead, it was a teleosauroid, which was a group of reptiles closely related to crocodilians
crocodilians and who were better adapted for marine environments.
Along with crocodilians and some other extinct reptiles, they formed the larger clade Crocodylomorpha.
Fossils of Lemmysuchus have been found in both England and France, which at the time was a shallow sea dotted with islands.
The English fossils are from the Oxford Clay Formation, formed roughly 166 to 163 million years ago during the Mid-Jurassic.
While no complete skeletons of Lemmysuchus have been found yet,
enough fossils are known to give a good idea what it looked like.
While not a true crocodilian, Lemmysuchus still had the general appearance of one, though it was had a more robust build.
Its body was six meters long, with a long tail to aid in propulsion.
This places Lemmysuchus as one of the largest teleosauroids, and indeed, one of the largest Middle Jurassic crocodylomorphs.
Some Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous teleosauroids, such as one of Lemmysuchus’s closest relative, Machimosaurus, would later grow to seven meters in size.
At a meter long, its skull was massive. It was wide and ended in a narrower but still relatively broad snout.
Within were large, blunt teeth. As for what it was using these teeth for, paleologist Dr. Lorna Steel said:
He was this big old nasty thing … he could have taken anything out that he wanted to eat.
While this may be somewhat hyperbolic, it is not far from the truth.
Lemmysuchus’s large, blunt teeth place it as part of the teleosauroid “crunch guild”.
These teleosauroids were able to use their teeth to crunch hard objects, with marine turtles thought to be the most likely prey.
This is in contrast to teleosauroids who specialized in hunting fish, who jaw and teeth were narrower.
However, members of the crunch guild are thought to have been less specialized than their fish-eating cousins, hunting large animals as well.
As mentioned earlier, when Lemmysuchus was alive, Europe was mostly a shallow sea dotted with islands of varying size.
As a species that stayed near coastal waters and could come ashore, Lemmysuchus lived in two, very different worlds.
In the water, most other marine reptiles, such as plesiosaurs and smaller crocodylomorphs,
would have been at risk of ending up in Lemmysuchus’s jaws.
Lemmysuchus was probably not the top predator in the ocean.
Pliosaurids, such as Liopleurodon, while not as large as portrayed in BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs,
were still slightly larger than Lemmysuchus.
While not as adept on land, Lemmysuchus would still have been a formidable predator.
With its great size, even medium sized dinosaurs would have been potential prey.
What is less clear is where Lemmysuchus fits in the crocodile evolutionary tree.
While Lemmysuchus and other teleosauroids were crocodylomorphs, it is unclear exactly how closely related they are to true crocodilians.
The closet relatives of the teleosauroids were the metriorhynchids, who were fully aquatic.
The clade formed by these two groups is called Thalattosuchia.
Thalattosuchia was usually been placed in Neosuchia along with crocodilians and other semi-aquatic crocodylomorphs.
However, it has recently been suggested that thalattosuchians like Lemmysuchus may instead
be more distant relations of crocodilians who acquired their semi-aquatic lifestyles evolved independently.
The taxonomic history of Lemmysuchus itself is also rather complicated.
While the Lemmysuchus genus was erected only a few years ago
its sole species, Lemmysuchus obtusidens was recognized as a distinct species in 1909, more than a century earlier.
At the time it was thought it was a new species of the Steneosaurus, instead of its own genus,
and was named Steneosaurus obtusidens. Steneosaurus obtusidens was later lumped with a
different species of Steneosaurus, Steneosaurus edwardsi.
This species was in turn considered by some paleontologists to instead possibly belong to the teleosauroid Machimosaurus.
More recent research of teleosauroid diversity once again found Steneosaurus obtusidens to be its own species.
. It was also found to differ enough from other teleosauroids to warrant its own genus, and hence the genus Lemmysuchus was finally erected in 2017,
This name translates to “Lemmy’s crocodile”.
As mentioned earlier, Lemmysuchus’s namesake is the rockstar Ian Fraser Kilmister, nicknamed Lemmy.
Lemmy is known for being the sole constant member of the famous heavy rock band Motörhead.
The idea to name the new teleosauroid genus after him came from paleontologist Dr Lorna Steel,
She said: “I’ve always been into heavy rock. Motörhead is one of my favorite bands and since Lemmy died I have been thinking, ‘How I can I get something named after Lemmy?’
"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."
Thank you for watching. And a thank you to Saw Hack Duggan for suggesting the topic of this video.
I hope both you and everyone else enjoyed it.
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