Known from a single species, Venaticosuchus rusconii, this genus is described based on an incomplete skull and jaw (as well as a lost partial forelimb and osteoderms) collected from the Late Triassic (Carnian) Ischigualasto Formation in the Ischigualasto-Villa Unión Basin in northwestern Argentina, which was deposited around 230 million years ago.

[1] Reconstructions of the jaw musculature of Venaticosuchus showed that it had a slow, strong bite, similar to those of herbivorous aetosaurs such as Desmatosuchus.

Venaticosuchus and other ornithosuchids were likely specialized scavengers, due to a combinations of features which suggested that they ate meat but were poorly adapted for dealing with living prey.

This site, located at Cerro Las Lajas in the province of La Rioja, contains outcrops from the middle part of the Ischigualasto Formation, which was deposited in the Late Triassic.

[1] This makes it difficult to gauge exactly when the Cerro Las Lajas site was formed, but it had to have been between ~231.7 and ~225.0 million years ago, based on radiometric dating of the youngest and oldest rocks in the Ischigualasto Formation.

[3] Further excavations at Cerro Las Lajas have revealed more familiar species similar to other exposures of the Ischigualasto Formation.

The original 1970/1971 description of Venaticosuchus, published by renowned Argentine paleontologist José Bonaparte, derived the generic name from the Latin venaticus, "hunting", and the Latinised Greek suchus, "crocodile".

It indicated that the fossil also included a partial forelimb and osteoderms (bony scutes),[5] but these remains have not been located by modern paleontologists and are thus considered missing.

[2] All known fossil material of Venaticosuchus is stored in the vertebrate paleontology collections of the Instituto Miguel Lillo at the National University of Tucumán.

[1] The total body length of Venaticosuchus is unknown, considering that only skull and jaw material is known in the present day.

This is similar to the case in other ornithosuchids, and Venaticosuchus particularly resembles Riojasuchus due to the maxilla curving upwards behind the diastema and the premaxilla hooking downwards in front of it.

As with other archosaurs, the rear lower part of the braincase possessed two different pairs of large, rounded plates: The basipterygoid processes (which are positioned at the base of the braincase and contact the roof of the mouth) and the basitubera (which are positioned further up and do not contact any bone, acting as levers for the musculi recti capitis anteriores that make the head nod).

On the other hand, the mandibular fenestra (a large hole on the side of the jaw) was elongated and proportionally more similar to that of Riojasuchus rather than Ornithosuchus.

[1] The holotype specimen possessed a peculiar pathology (sign of an injury or disease) on the left side of the skull.

Considering that there is no evidence of bite marks or bone fractures on the surface of the swollen area, the latter hypothesis seems less likely, so the pathology was likely a facial infection.

It found several interesting results surrounding jaw action between Venaticosuchus, other ornithosuchids, aetosaurs, and modern crocodilians (represented by Alligator mississippiensis).

Von Baczko (2018) proposed that ornithosuchids were specialized scavengers, which could deal with carcasses using their strong bite force and serrated teeth.

[2] In a 2023 study, biomechanical analysis again found that the related Riojasuchus had poor resistance to lateral forces and greater resistance to traction and torsion forces, but it was noted that the short mandible (shorter than the upper jaw, as typical for ornithosuchids) did not allow occlusion between the mandibular teeth and those on the premaxilla.

This dental configuration does not seem suitable for the action of grabbing or slicing pieces of meat from a carcass, thus excluding a scavenger lifestyle.