Romer published his description of Luperosuchus in 1971, as part of a series of articles describing the numerous "thecodonts" he had collected from the Chañares Formation. The binomial name, Luperosuchus fractus, refers to the fragmentary and "perplexing" nature of the fossil, and is derived from the Greek ("vexing", "difficult", "troublesome") and ("crocodile"), with the specific name is from the Latin fractus, meaning "broken".
