Shringasaurus was an allokotosaur, a group of unusual herbivorous reptiles from the Triassic, and is most closely related to the smaller and better known Azendohsaurus in the family Azendohsauridae.
It closely resembles the related Azendohsaurus, with its small, boxy head on a long neck and a large, barrel-shaped body with deep shoulders and ribs, sprawled to semi-sprawled limbs and a short tail.
Like other azendohsaurids, the first-through-middle cervical vertebrae are characteristically elongated, giving Shringasaurus a long, raised neck, although it is proportionately shorter than in Azendohsaurus and Pamelaria.
The first twelve dorsals are also marked by various well-defined laminae that bound deep fossae (depressions in the bone), similar to those found on the vertebrae of sauropods.
The humerus is likewise similar, with broad ends and a narrow midshaft, and a very well-developed deltopectoral crest half as long as the whole bone, indicating powerful forelimbs.
[1] The bonebed itself was preserved in a crevasse splay deposit composed of cross-bedded, dipped sandstone with irregular boundaries that breached along the south edge of an ancient filled river channel.
The bonebed is monodominant, only containing fossils of Shringasaurus, and preserves eight individuals based on the minimum number of unique right femora, left humeri, skull roofs and horns discovered.
It was then described and named in August 2017 by Sarandee Sengupta and Bandyopadhyay, as well as by Martín D. Ezcurra of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Argentine Museum in Argentina.
The holotype specimen, ISIR 780, consists of a partial skull roof including the prefrontal, frontal, postfrontal and parietal bones, along with a pair of large supra-orbital horns.
The family is typically grouped within the recently recognised clade Allokotosauria, along with the trilophosaurids, as was recovered by Sengupta and colleagues when they described Shringasaurus and analysed its phylogenetic relationships in 2017.
It is particularly similar to Azendohsaurus in features of the parietals, the lower jaw, shoulder, hip, femur and vertebrae, but can be distinguished by teeth that are not expanded above the roots, the lack of a groove on the inside surface of the maxilla, tall neural spines, and of course the horns.
The herd appears to have died in a mass mortality event and was buried in a short span of time, possibly drowned by a breached levee.
The herd was likely congregating around a nearby river channel during a period of environmental stress such as a drought, as occurs in living herbivores and has also been inferred for some dinosaurs.
Its describers considered its horns to be likely products of sexual selection, not primarily for defence or species recognition (as has been proposed for the head ornaments of dinosaurs).
The two cervicals are partially fused together, interpreted as either the result of a birth defect, spondyloarthropathy (a type of arthritis), or possibly a bacterial or fungal disc infection.
and a variety of temnospondyl amphibians, including the capitosaurid Paracyclotosaurus crookshanki, the mastodonsaurid Cherninia denwai, a lonchorhynchine trematosaurid, and a brachyopid.
[1][7][14] The environment is interpreted as representing a dry, semi-arid floodplain with slow moving, anabranching rivers that periodically burst their banks.