Europelta was by its describers placed in the Nodosauridae, forming a smaller clade Struthiosaurinae together with the European nodosaurids Anoplosaurus, Hungarosaurus and Struthiosaurus.
In 1871, he described a skull fragment found in an Austrian coal mine years before by colleagues Ferdinand Stoliczka and Eduard Suess as the type specimen for the dinosaur genus Struthiosaurus, the first discovered in the region.