The best known and type species is Pelorovis oldowayensis, from the Early Pleistocene of Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, though two others, P. turkanensis and P. howelli, are currently recognised.

"Pelorovis" antiquus, from the Late Pleistocene-Holocene, and "P." kaisensis, have since been moved into Syncerus, the same genus as living African buffalo.

Tooth wear patterns suggest that it occasionally fed on other plants, which may point towards seasonal dietary shifts.

Initially, Reck believed that he had uncovered the remains of a large member of the subfamily Caprinae, which includes modern goats and sheep.

[2] The binomial name chosen by Reck is compounded from the Greek πέλωρος (péloros) in the sense of "monstrous" or "huge and terrible"[3] and Latin ovis, meaning "sheep".

[4] In 1991, John Michael Harris described remains uncovered as part of the Koobi Fora research project in northern Kenya.

[6] In 2005, Djillali Hadjouis and Mohamed Sahnouni described a third Pelorovis species based on a partial skull recovered from the Aïn Hanech Formation of Algeria.

[10] A 2007 study by Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro and colleagues of the morphology of the fossil remains came to the conclusion that Pelorovis is probably not monophyletic.

In contrast, they find that the late Pleistocene form Pelorovis antiquus seems to be a close relative of the modern African buffalo (Syncerus caffer).

[11] A number of the authors of this study reiterated their classification of the taxa Pelorovis turkanensis and P. oldowayensis in the genus Bos in another paper published 2014.

[12] Alexandre Hassanin, in 2014, followed the interpretations of Martínez-Navarro et al., pointing to previous genetics work which show that the bovid lineages which produced the modern species within the genera Bos, Bubalus and Syncerus split from each other some eight to nine million years ago, indicating that either the fossil ancestors of these species have not yet been discovered, or that they already have been found, but are taxonomically misidentified.

Lastly, Hassanin notes that if Pelorovis is reduced into synonymy due to these studies, this also implies the other Pleistocene fossil genera Leptobos and Epileptobos are synonymous with Bos.

[14] The long-horned buffalo, Syncerus antiquus, was described by Georges Louis Duvernoy in 1851 from a skull discovered along the Bou Sellam River near the city of Sétif, Algeria.

[18][19] However, a link with the living Cape buffalo has been noted based on morphological and systematic grounds, and since 1994 it has been suggested that P. antiquus be moved into Syncerus.

[23] Both sexes bore massive horn cores that were elongated and curved sharply,[24] forming a half-circle shape in the case of P.

However, some wear patterns suggest mixed feeding, possibly indicating a short-term seasonal dietary shift.

[28] A bonebed in Olduvai Gorge, Bell Korongo 5 (BK5) preserves a total of 24 mature Pelorovis oldowayensis.

Extensively disturbed by either scavengers or water flow, they were initially suspected by their discoverer, Louis Leakey, to represent casualties of a mass mortality event, such as a flood.

In 2015, it was proposed that the BK5 P. oldowayensis died over the course of many years, as a result of natural death and predation, including by humans such as Homo erectus.