The authors who initially described the fossil, classified
Eshanosaurus as a member of the
Therizinosauroidea on the basis of six distinct characteristics of the jaw and teeth, making it the earliest known
coelurosaur, a
maniraptoran living long before
Archaeopteryx, 60 million years before certain basal
therizinosaurs such as
Falcarius and
Beipiaosaurus. A
cladistic analysis was not performed and the authors "speculatively" suggested it was the most basal known therizinosauroid. Xu, Zhao and Clark, however, had examined the possibility that
Eshanosaurus was a prosauropod, given that it was found below numerous fossils of
Lufengosaurus, a prosauropod of which the lower jaw closely resembles in general shape that of a therizinosaur. The authors arrived at their conclusion that the specimen represented an Early Jurassic therizinosauroid, by testing the possibility that it were a basal sauropodomorph as rigorously as they could using the comparative method: the six traits found were those shared between
Eshanosaurus and therizinosaurs to the exclusion of prosauropods. The describers of
Martharaptor noted that all but three of the putative therizinosaurian characteristics of
Eshanosaurus identified by Barrett (2009) are also known in sauropodomorphs. Sues and Averianov (2016) considered the putative therizinosaurian affinites of
Eshanosaurus to be problematic. ==See also==