The discovery of this superb specimen has shed light onto poorly understood aspects of herrerasaurid anatomy such as endocranial soft tissues.

Stratigraphically correlated beds from a nearby site were dated as the middle of the Carnian stage of the Late Triassic, circa 233.23 ± 0.73 million years ago.

[1] The monospecific genus was named and described by Cristian Pacheco, Rodrigo Temp Müller, Max Langer, Flávio Augusto Pretto, Leonardo Kerber and Sérgio Dias da Silva in an article published in 2019.

Most other aspects of the skull, such as the thick squamosal, expanded front branch of the jugal, the shape of the infratemporal fenestra, and a lack of palatal teeth, are most similar to herrerasaurids among early dinosaurs.

The occipital condyle is also thicker, the basioccipital has a V-shaped (rather than U-shaped) contact with the parabasisphenoid, and the paroccipital processes are larger in Gnathovorax compared to Herrerasaurus.

The dentary lacks sauropodomorph qualities and instead likely possessed a sliding joint at the chin similar to other herrerasaurids, although preservation is not good enough to fully confirm this.

The tail vertebrae are most similar to Herrerasaurus, with low and elongated zygapophyses, upwards-pointing neural spines, and transverse processes which are semicircular in cross section.

[1] In 2022, Aureliano and colleagues performed a mirco-computed tomography scan on the postcranial skeletons of some of the earliest saurischian dinosaurs that lived during the late Carnian including Gnathovorax with sauropodomorphs Pampadromaeus and Buriolestes, which showed that the invasive air sac system was absent and that their bones were not pneumatised.

These results indicate that pneumatisation in archosaur groups (pterosaurs, theropods and sauropodomorphs) are not homologous, but are traits that independently evolved at least 3 times.

It possessed a large floccular fossa lobe (FFL) of the cerebellum, a portion of the brain generally (but not universally) considered useful for motor control of the eye, head, and neck.

These features mean that most paleontologists consider a large FFL to be indicative of an active predatory lifestyle, explaining why it is reduced in later sauropodomorphs but not in most theropods.