[1] Von Huene considered C. koeneni to be a late-surviving species of Pelycosauria, a group of distant mammal relatives otherwise known only from the Late Carboniferous and Early Permian.

Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel placed C. koeneni as a temnospondyl amphibian closely related to the sail-backed Platyhystrix (which, like Dimetrodon, was from the Early Permian).

[2] The name Ctenosaurus was preoccupied by a species of iguanid lizard (now called Ctenosaura), so a new generic name, Ctenosauriscus, was erected by paleontologist Oskar Kuhn in 1964.

[3] Paleontologist B. Krebs redescribed the holotype and reclassified Ctenosauriscus as an archosaur based on similarities with the sail-backed pseudosuchian Hypselorhachis from the Middle Triassic Manda Beds of Tanzania.

[2] A redescription of the holotype was published by Richard J. Butler, Stephen L. Brusatte, Mike Reich, Sterling J. Nesbitt, Rainer R. Schoch and Jahn J. Hornung in 2011.

[2] A 1998 study proposed that Ctenosauriscus was bipedal and that its elongated neural spines served to absorb the forces exerted from walking on two legs.

Although limb bones are unknown, the study found that forces on the tips of the spines were focused on a point below the spinal column, hypothesized to be the knee joint.