Fossils attributable to the type species B. fritschi have been collected from the town of Freital in Saxony, Germany, near the city of Dresden.

[5] Later preparation of the material examined by Credner through a technique of removing the soft bone from the surrounding matrix mechanically and casting the cavities in liquid latex has revealed more anatomical detail suggesting that three taxa were present in Freital, not two.

A specimen previously referred to Petrobates truncatus was first considered by Robert L. Carroll and Pamela Gaskill in 1978 to be a microsaur rather than a reptile.

A newly discovered specimen of microsaur from the Saar-Nahe district in southwestern Germany has confirmed that Brachystelechus and Batropetes represent the same species.

[2] The characters that previously distinguished the two genera from one another are all found in one specimen, known as SMNS 55884, housed in the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart.

The parietals of the specimen are wide and the skull is short, both of which are features that associate it with the North American genera Carrolla and Quasicaecilia.

[8][9] On the basis of these and other similarities, Carroll, who described the new material in 1991, constructed a new microbrachomorph family called the Brachystelechidae to include Batropetes, Carrolla, and Quasicaecilia.

SMNS 55884 was noted to differ from the type specimen of B. fritschi in the number of presacral vertebrae, the width between the eye sockets, the shape of the prefrontal, postorbital, and scapulocoracoid bones, and the position of the obturator foramen in the hips.