In the early 1880s collector Alfred Nicholson Leeds acquired a skeleton of a dinosaur excavated at a small brick pit at the hamlet of Tanholt, close to Eye, Cambridgeshire.

[1] The holotype, NHMUK R1989, was found in the Peterborough Member of the Oxford Clay Formation, more especially the Kosmoceras jason biozone dating from the middle Callovian.

However, on 22 August 1888 Othniel Charles Marsh visited Leeds' collection at Eyebury and recognised these elements as belonging to a giant fish, in 1889 by Arthur Smith Woodward named Leedsichthys.

The generic name is derived from the Lexovii, a Gallic tribe in ancient times inhabiting the region of Normandy, where several stegosaurian specimens had been discovered which by Hoffstetter were referred to Lexovisaurus.

Hofstetter also referred a much more complete stegosaurian skeleton in 1901 discovered by Leeds in the Fletton brick pit, specimen BMNH R3167 that in 1911 had been named Stegosaurus priscus, placed as a stegosaurine.

[1] The Fletton and Normandy material show a combination of narrow flat plates on the back and round pointed spines that ran along the tail.