It did n’t live on a diet of cigaret and whiskey , nor was it peculiarly good at playing the bass voice guitar . Nevertheless , this newly described genus of " prehistoric crocodile " is such a tough cat scientist have named it after Ian " Lemmy " Kilmister , the tight - playing and hard - living frontman of the set Motörhead , who passed aside in 2015 .
Lemmysuchusobtusidens , aka Lemmy ’s blunt - toothed crocodile , was one of the most dreadful predators to float off the British coastline around 164 million years ago during the Middle Jurassic Period . It belong to to a family known as teleosauridae , an extinct family of crocodile - like marine reptiles that were once distributed throughout the world ’s ocean .
" It would have been one of the tumid coastal piranha of its clock time , " researchers from the Natural History Museum ( NHM ) said ina instruction . " The teeth were large and blunt , pure for smash prey such as turtle . "
Paleontologists unearthed a skull and some other bones of this specimen in 1909 at a Lucius DuBignon Clay infernal region quarry near Peterborough , Cambridgeshire in the UK . However , it was initially mistaken for a Steneosaurus , another genus of nonextant crocodile - similar animal , due to its elongated and tube-shaped snout . Several decennium later , its stead on the teleosaurid family - tree became the subject of blistering debate ( contend about the validity of species and genus is a favorite interest of fossilist ) .
A recent re - examination of the specimen ’s split remains by an international team has untangled its unfeigned identicalness , as revealed in their subject published in theZoological Journal of the Linnean Society . psychoanalysis of its nigh - complete skull , partially - all over skeletal system , and its blunt teeth showed that the specimen was not like the other crocodilian from the land site .
They corroborate it was a totally novel genus and it was honor with a new scientific name , Lemmysuchusobtusidens , which comes from the Latin for blunt ( obtusus ) and tooth ( dens ) .
“ Although Lemmy passed away at the end of 2015 , ” added Lorna Steel , an NHM curator who worked on the subject field , “ we ’d like to think that he would have raised a glass to Lemmysuchus , one of the nastiest ocean beast to have ever inhabited the Earth . ”
Judging by the artist ’s rendering of the previous Lemmysuchus , which would n’t look out of place on the arm of a alloy album ( the traffic pattern on its nous was barrack by the banding ’s Snaggletooth logotype ) , we ’re pretty sure Lemmy would sanction .
