[1] The holotype, which is housed in the collections of the Field Museum in Chicago, consists of a fragmentary and disarticulated skull and incomplete postcranial skeleton.

The specimen which Langston designated as the holotype was discovered by Rainier Zangerl, Bill Turnbull and Charles Barber on a Field Museum expedition in 1946 and was given catalogue number FMNH P 27383.

Preserved cranial material includes a partial quadrate, left maxilla, teeth, jugal, lacrimal, nasal (with the namesake crest), postorbital, frontal, prefrontal, parietal, squamosal, and paroccipital process and a portion of the predentary bone.

The specimen was likely washed out to sea by a river, where it eventually sank and was buried in the silty carbonate sediments of the Mississippi embayment.

James Lamb in 1998 has suggested the genus may actually represent a basal iguanodont, an idea that has failed to find widespread acceptance.