[1] In 1934, a team of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) headed by Barnum Brown, financed by the Sinclair Oil Corporation, uncovered about three thousand sauropod bones on the land of rancher Barker Howe near Shell, in Big Horn County.

[3] In 2010 Andreas Christian used the well-preserved vertebrae to support his hypothesis that sauropod necks were held in a rather upright position,[4] which was confirmed by Armin Schmitt studying the vestibular system of Kaatedocus.

In 2012 this was named Kaatedocus siberi, by the Swiss palaeontologist Emanuel Tschopp, who as a boy had visited the excavations, and his Portuguese colleague Octávio Mateus.

The generic name, which means "small beam", combines a reference to the related form Diplodocus with a Crow Indian diminutive suffix ~kaate.

[1] An additional specimen consisting of a braincase from the Aathal Dinosaur Museum collection (SMA D16-3) was referred to Kaatedocus in 2013,[6] and its referral was corroborated in 2015 based on an exhaustive phylogenetic analysis.

Amargatitanis Suuwassea Pilmatueia Dicraeosaurus Amargasaurus Brachytrachelopan To support their analysis, Whitlock and Wilson evaluated the characters that Kaatedocus supposedly shared with Diplodocidae: "antorbital fenestra with concave dorsal margin; a 'hooked' prefrontal; box-like basal tubera; and the elongate coel on posterior cervical neural spines."

Additionally, they independently test their results by conducting a supplemental analysis utilizing a modified dataset of Mannion et al. (2019)[8] which also recovered Kaatedocus within Dicraeosauridae.