Palaeoscincus rugosidens was named by Gilmore (1930). Its type specimen is USNM 11868, a partial skeleton, and it is not a trace fossil. Its type locality is north side, Milk River (USNM), which is in a Campanian terrestrial horizon in the Two Medicine Formation of Montana. It was considered monophyletic by Vickaryous et al. (2004).

It was recombined as Edmontonia rugosidens by Russell (1939), Russell (1940), Kuhn (1964), Tatarinov (1964), Russell (1964), Simmons (1965), Russell (1966), Bodily (1970), Carpenter (1990), Coombs (1990), Coombs and Deméré (1996), Vickaryous and Ryan (1997), Pereda Suberbiola and Barrett (1999), Trexler (2001), Eberth et al. (2001), Carpenter (2001), Barrett (2001), Ford and Kirkland (2001), Garcia and Pereda-Suberbiola (2003), Vickaryous et al. (2004), Ryan and Evans (2005), Vickaryous (2006), Lü et al. (2007), Longrich (2008), Burns (2008), Osi and Makádi (2009), Parsons and Parsons (2009), Stanford et al. (2011), Loewen et al. (2013), Kirkland et al. (2013), Leahey and Salisbury (2013), Penkalski (2014), Arbour et al. (2014), Blows (2014), Han et al. (2014), Burns and Lucas (2015), Borinder et al. (2016) and Kineer et al. (2016); it was recombined as Panoplosaurus rugosidens by Coombs (1979), Lehman (1981) and Jasinski et al. (2011); it was recombined as Edmontonia (Chassternbergia) rugosidens by Bakker (1988); it was recombined as Chassternbergia rugosidens by Olshevsky (1992), Ford (2000) and Galton (2019).