Hesham Sallam, a paleontologist at Mansoura University, together with a team of students discovered a sauropod skeleton in the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt's Western Desert.

[2] Based on this skeleton, the type species Mansourasaurus shahinae was named and described in January 2018, by Hesham M. Sallam, Eric Gorscak, Patrick M. O'Connor, Iman A. El-Dawoudi, Sanaa El-Sayed, Sara Saber, Mahmoud A. Kora, Joseph J. W. Sertich, Erik R. Seiffert and Matthew C. Lamanna.

[3] The Mansourasaurus specimen described in 2018 is its holotype, MUVP 200, discovered in a layer of the Quseir Formation dating from the late Campanian, about seventy-three million years old.

In at least one anterior middle neck vertebra the parapophysis, the process which bears the facet for the lower rib head, has a horizontal length equal to the vertebral centrum as a whole.

A cladistic analysis showed it to belong to a clade of otherwise largely Eurasian sauropods, also including Ampelosaurus, Lirainosaurus, Nemegtosaurus, Opisthocoelicaudia and Paludititan, more or less contemporaneous forms.

Mansourasaurus represents the best-known continental African (i.e. excluding Madagascar) titanosaur of the Upper Cretaceous from the time period after the Cenomanian.