Einiosaurus is a genus of herbivorous centrosaurine ceratopsian dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian stage) of northwestern Montana. The name means 'bison lizard', in a combination of Blackfeet Indian eini and Latinized Ancient Greek sauros; the specific name (procurvicornis) means 'with a forward-curving horn' in Latin. Einiosaurus is medium-sized with an estimated body length at 4.5 metres (15 ft).

Einiosaurus is an exclusively Montanan dinosaur, and all of its known remains are currently held at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. At least fifteen individuals of varying ages are represented by three adult skulls and hundreds of other bones from two low-diversity, monospecific (one species) bonebeds, which were discovered by Jack Horner in 1985 and excavated from 1985 to 1989 by Museum of the Rockies field crews.

Horner had not been searching for horned dinosaurs. In the spring of 1985 he had been informed by landowner Jim Peebles that he would no longer be allowed access to the Willow Creek "Egg Mountain" site where during six years a nesting colony of Maiasaura had been excavated. This forced Horner to find an alternative site because supplies had already been bought for a new summer season and fourteen volunteers and students expected to be employed by him. He investigated two sites, Devil's Pocket and Red Rocks, that however proved to contain too few fossils. For some years, since 1982, Horner had requested from the Blackfeet Indian Tribal Council access to the Landslide Butte site. The field notes of Charles Whitney Gilmore from the 1920s indicated that dinosaur eggs could be found there. The council had consistently turned down his requests because they feared widespread disturbance of the reservation. However, one of its members, Marvin Weatherwax, had earlier in 1985 observed that an excavation by Horner of a mosasaurid in the Four Horns Lake had caused only limited damage to the landscape. In early July, the council granted Horner access to the entire reservation.

Early in August, Horner's associate Bob Makela discovered the Dino Ridge Quarry, containing extensive ceratopsid remains, on the land of farmer Ricky Reagan. Continual rainfall hampered operations that year. On 20 June 1986, a crew of sixteen returned to reopen the quarry. A large and dense concentration of bones, a bonebed, was excavated, with up to forty bones per square metre being present. This was interpreted as representing an entire herd that had perished. In late August 1986, Horner and preparator Carrie Ancell on the land of Gloria Sundquist discovered a second horned dinosaur site, at one mile distance from the first, called the Canyon Bone Bed, in which two relatively complete skulls were dug up. The skulls had to be removed from a rather steep cliff and weighed about half a tonne when plastered. They were airlifted by a Bell UH-1 Iroquois of the United States Army National Guard into trucks to be transported. The aberrant build of these skulls first suggested to Horner that they might represent an unknown taxon. Unexpectedly benefiting from a grant of $204,000 by the MacArthur Fellows Program, Horner was able to reopen the two bonebed quarries in 1987. That year almost all fossils were removed that could be accessed without using mechanised earth-moving equipment. Also, an additional horned dinosaur skull was excavated from a somewhat younger layer. In 1988, more ceratopsid material was found in a more southern site, the Blacktail Creek North. In the second week of June 1989, student Scott Donald Sampson in the context of his doctoral research with a small crew reopened the Canyon Bone Bed, while Patrick Leiggi that summer with a limited number of workers restarted excavating the Dino Ridge Quarry. The same year, Horner himself found more horned dinosaur fossils at the Blacktail Creek North. In 1990, the expeditions were ended because the reservation allowed access to commercial fossil hunters who quickly strip-mined sites with bulldozers, through a lack of proper documentation greatly diminishing the scientific value of the discoveries.

At the time of the expeditions, it was assumed that all horned dinosaur fossils found in the reservation belonged to a single species, especially as they came from a limited geological time period, its duration estimated at about half a million years. In the 1920s, George Freyer Sternberg had already found ceratopsid bones there, that were named as a second species of Styracosaurus: Styracosaurus ovatus. The material had been rather limited and the validity of this species had been doubted, some considering it a nomen dubium. The abundant new remains seemed to prove that the species was real, also because it clearly differed from the type species of Styracosaurus, Styracosaurus albertensis. The comprehensive taphonomic study by Raymond Robert Rogers from 1990 however, did not commit itself fully to this identification, merely mentioning a Styracosaurus sp. Rogers had joined the expedition in 1987. This reflected the fact that the expedition members had started to take the possibility into account that the species was completely new to science, informally referring to it as "Styracosaurus makeli" in honour of Bob Makela, who had died in a traffic accident in June 1987. In 1990, this name, as an invalid nomen nudum because it lacked a description, appeared in a photo caption in a book by Stephen Czerkas.

Horner was an expert on the Hadrosauridae, several sites of which had also been discovered in Landslide Butte, including the juveniles and eggs that were the focus of his research. He had less affinity for other kinds of dinosaurs. In 1987 and 1989, to resolve the Styracosaurus question, horned dinosaur specialist Peter Dodson was invited to investigate the new ceratopsian finds. In 1990, the fossil material was seen by Dodson as strengthening the case for the validity of a separate Styracosaurus ovatus, to be distinguished from Styracosaurus albertensis.

Horner had gradually changed his mind on the subject. While still thinking that a single population of horned dinosaurs had been present, he began to see it as a chronospecies, an evolutionary series of taxa. In 1992, he described them in an article as three "transitional taxa" that had spanned the gap between the older Styracosaurus and the later Pachyrhinosaurus. He deliberately declined to name these three taxa. The oldest form was indicated as "Transitional Taxon A", mainly represented by skull MOR 492. Then came "Taxon B" – the many skeletons of the Dinosaur Ridge Quarry and the Canyon Bone Bed. The youngest was "Taxon C", represented by skull MOR 485 found in 1987 and the horned dinosaur fossils of the Blacktail Creek North. In a 1997 book, Horner referred to the three taxa as "centrosaurine 1.", "centrosaurine 2." and "centrosaurine 3.".

In 1994, Sampson, in a talk during the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, named Horner's "Taxon B" as a new genus and species, Einiosaurus procurvicornis. Although an abstract was published containing a sufficient description, making the name valid, it did not yet identify by inventory number a holotype, a name-bearing specimen. The same abstract named Type C as Achelousaurus horneri. In 1995, Sampson published a larger article, indicating the holotype. The generic name Einiosaurus is derived from the Blackfeet eini, "American bison", and Latinised Greek saurus, "lizard". The name was chosen to honour the Blackfeet tribe but also to reflect the fact that ceratopsids were, in Sampson's words, "the buffalo of the Cretaceous", living in herds and having a complex life. According to Sampson, the name should be pronounced as "eye-knee-o-saurus". The specific name is derived from Latin procurvus, "bent forwards", and cornu, "horn", referring to the forwards curving nasal horn.