|left The
holotype,
DORCM G 913, was collected by Charles Willcox, an amateur paleontologist living at
Swanage, from the Feather Quarry near
Durlston Bay in a marine deposition of
Cherty Freshwater Member of the
Lulworth Formation, dating from the middle Berriasian. It consists of an about three inch long left dentary fragment with nine teeth. The holotype was once thought to be lost but was rediscovered during the 1970s in the
Dorset County Museum. Later several other teeth and specimen BMNH 48207, another dentary fragment from a somewhat smaller individual, were referred to the species. Owen in 1878 also assumed some fossilised scutes, of a type for which he coined the name "granicones", belonged to
Nuthetes but these were in 2002 shown to be limb or tail
osteoderms of a
turtle, possibly
"Helochelydra" anglica or
"H." bakewelli. In 2006 a tooth from
France found at the Berriasian aged Cherves-de-Cognac locality, specimen CHEm03.537, was referred to a
Nuthetes sp. Some large specimens referred to
Nuthetes may instead belong to
Dromaeosauroides. Additional teeth have been attributed to
Nuthetes from the nearby
Angeac-Charente bonebed in western France. The genus
Nuthetes contains one species (the
type species),
Nuthetes destructor.
N. destructor was named and described by
Richard Owen in 1854. The generic name
Nuthetes is derived from the
Koine Greek nouthetes, a contraction of νουθέτητης (
nouthetetes) meaning "one who admonishes" or "a monitor," in reference to the similarity of
Nuthetes teeth to those of a modern
monitor lizard. The
specific name is
Latin for "destroyer", a reference to "the adaptations of the teeth for piercing, cutting, and lacerating the prey" of a form he estimated to be equal in size to the present
Bengal monitor. ==Classification==