Russian paleontologists Yuri Bolotsky and Sergei Kurzanov first described and named this dinosaur in 1991. The generic name is derived from the Amur River and the Greek word sauros (“lizard”). The Amur (called Heilongjiang or “Black Dragon River” in Chinese) forms the border of Russia and China, and is near where this dinosaur’s remains were found. There is one known species (A. riabinini), named in honor of the late Russian paleontologist Anatoly Riabinin, who conducted the first Russian expeditions to recover dinosaur remains in the Amur region in 1916 and 1917.
In cahoots with Godefroit and Itterbeeck, Bolotsky revisited the Blagoveschensk bone pile in 2004 and realised that many of the bones belonged to Amurosuarus, albeit seperate individuals, and it instantly became the most abundantly known dinosaur ever discovered on Russian territory. On top of that the age of the Udurchukan Formation bodes well for the “Asian origin for lambeosaurines” hypothesis, and experts surmise that these duck-billed critters and other Asian vertebrate groups travelled across the Beringian isthmus into western North America via a land route that may have opened during the Aptian–Albian and persisted during the Late Cretaceous.
Amurosaurus is characterized by many autapomorphies, or unique features, of the skull, as well as the sigmoidal shape of the ulna (a lower arm bone) when viewed from the front or side. Most other known lambeosaurines have hollow crests on the top of their skulls, and although the bones that would make up such a crest are unknown in this dinosaur, the bones of the roof of the skull are modified to support one, so it can be assumed that Amurosaurus was crested as well.
