[1] During the Mesozoic era, the southern continents (South America, Antarctica, Australia, and Africa in addition to India and Zealandia) were unified into a supercontinent known as Gondwana.

[3] The possibility of a biogeographic connection between South America and ankylosaurs in Australia was raised alongside discovery, though based on conjecture.

Vertebrae of Antarctopelta from Antarctica, for example, were so foreign compared to those of euankylosaurs that it was questioned if they might instead belong to a marine reptile, which would make the genus based on a chimeric specimen.

The type specimen of the genus preserved enough of the skeleton to make it clear that there was a previously unrecognized monophyletic grouping of these southern ankylosaur taxa.

[1] The Parankylosauria may not have been the only Gondwanan ankylosaurians; Patagopelta was described from Argentina in 2022, and has been found to be closely allied with North American nodosaurids in the subfamily Nodosaurinae.

[8][9] In one of their analyses, Fonseca et al. (2024) recovered the enigmatic thyreophoran Jakapil as a basal ankylosaur, sister to both Parankylosauria and Euankylosauria.

This weapon is known directly in the genus Stegouros, suspected based on indirect evidence in Antarctopelta, and not confirmed in Kunbarrasaurus, for which a complete tail is not known.

[10] The following cladogram is reproduced from the phylogenetic analysis in the 2021 study by Sergio Soto-Acuña and colleagues:[1] Lesothosaurus Scutellosaurus Emausaurus Scelidosaurus Huayangosaurus Stegosauridae Kunbarrasaurus Antarctopelta Stegouros Nodosauridae Liaoningosaurus Gobisaurus Shamosaurus Ankylosaurinae In 2022, a study by Timothy G. Frauenfelder and colleagues on a new specimen (SAMA P40536) tentatively referred to Kunbarrasaurus tested their new specimen in the dataset of the 2021 study, finding a similar placement and composition of Parankylosauria, but also coded the specimen for an older phylogenetic dataset of a 2016 paper by Victoria Arbour and Phil Currie.