[4] The next discovery came accidentally in 1859 when while Captain John N. Macomb was leading a U.S. Army Engineers survey from Santa Fe to the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, his crew camped south of what is now Moab, Utah.

[5][6] In August, a geologist from the crew named John Strong Newberry, unearthed several large fossil bones in sandstone rocks elevated in a canyon wall near the camp.

[5][6] Newberry successfully excavated several of the bones with several other crew members while using poor equipment, but several fossils remained in the sandstone rocks due to the team's time constraints of the expedition.

[5] The specific name reads as Latin viae malae, "of the bad road", a reference to the various arduous routes taken to find, reach and salvage the remains.

It would have been of moderate size for a sauropod; it may have been approximately 13 metres (43 ft) long,[b] with a mass of roughly 7–12 tonnes (7.7–13.2 short tons).

[13] The scapula bears a subtriangular projection on the base of the scapular blade, which Tschopp et al.'s analysis found to be an autapomorphy of the taxon, though this trait also occurs in various other sauropods.

Friedrich von Huene, the first to determine it was of Jurassic age, in 1904 created a special family for it, the Dystrophaeidae, which he assumed to be herbivorous theropods.

[1] Newer finds of Dystrophaeus have led paleontologist John Foster and colleagues to suggest it was most closely related to Macronarian or Eusauropod dinosaurs,[6] although much material has yet to be prepared.