Camptosaurus leedsi was named by Lydekker (1889). Its type specimen is BMNH R1993, a set of limb elements, and it is a 3D body fossil. Its type locality is Fletton brick pit, Peterborough (BMNH), which is in a Callovian marine horizon in the Oxford Clay Formation of the United Kingdom.

It was considered a nomen dubium by Norman and Weishampel (1990); it was considered a nomen dubium by Norman (2004); it was recombined as Callovosaurus leedsi by Galton (1980), Weishampel and Weishampel (1983), Galton (1983), Martill (1988), Ruiz-Omeñaca et al. (2007), Ruiz-Omeñaca et al. (2007), Naish and Martill (2008), McDonald et al. (2010), Wang et al. (2011), Zheng et al. (2013), Verdú et al. (2015), Fuentes Vidarte et al. (2016), Hübner (2016), Bell et al. (2018), Madzia et al. (2018), Herne et al. (2019), Párraga and Prieto-Márquez (2019), Dieudonné et al. (2020), Verdú et al. (2021) and Rotatori et al. (2022).