In the summer of 1947, fieldwork was done at Duchy Quarry in
Glamorgan in southern Wales. Grey
conglomerate that formed fissure fill deposits within
karstic voids in
Carboniferous limestone was extracted. In 1949,
Walter Georg Kühne noted the lower cheek tooth of a primitive mammal while examining samples of the rock. He named it
Morganucodon watsoni, with the genus name being derived from Morganuc, which Kühne stated was the name of South
Glamorgan in the
Domesday Book, with the species name being in honour of
D. M. S. Watson.
[2] Additional remains of
M. watsoni were described by Kühne in 1958.
[3] Also in 1958,
Kenneth Kermack and Frances Mussett described additional remains from Pant Quarry, about a mile from Duchy Quarry, that had been collected in 1956.
[4] In August 1948, an expedition to
Lufeng in
Yunnan, China yielded a 1 in (2.5 cm) long skull. It was shortly sent to Beijing (then Peking) and then eventually sent out of China, and deposited with Kenneth Kermack at
University College London in 1960. The specimen was preliminarily described in 1963 by Harold W. Rigney, who noted the similarity to
Morganucodon from Britain, and considered it cogeneric, naming the new species
Morganucodon oehleri in honor of the reverend Edgar T. Oehler, who had originally collected the specimen.
[5] In 1978
C. C. Young described
Eozostrodon heikuopengensis from the Hei Koa Peng locality near Lufeng, based on an associated skull and dentary, as well as a right maxilla and associated dentary.
[6] A revision by
William A. Clemens in 1979 assigned this species to
Morganucodon, based on its close similarity to the two previously named species.
[4] In 1980 Clemens named the species
Morganucodon peyeri, from isolated teeth found in Late Triassic (
Rhaetian) deposits near
Hallau, Switzerland, with the species being named after paleontologist
Bernhard Peyer.
[7] In 1981, Kermack, Mussett and Rigney published an extensive monograph on the skull of
Morganucodon.
[8] In 2016
Percy Butler and
Denise Sigogneau-Russell named the species
Morganucodon tardus from an upper right molar (M34984) collected from the Watton Cliff locality near
Eype in
Dorset, England, dating to the late
Bathonian stage of the
Middle Jurassic. The species being named after the Latin
tardus, late, in reference to it being the youngest member of the genus.
[9]
Brutal.
