Liu and colleagues conducted a separate phylogenetic analysis in 2017. They criticized the analysis of Rieppel and colleagues as having unnecessarily repeated several characters in their data, thus imbuing the repeated characters with undue weight in the analysis. In their own analysis, Liu and colleagues used the same source datasets, but deleted repeated characters, added two new characters from an analysis by Sean Modesto and Hans-Dieter Sues (2004), and removed poorly preserved or potentially chimeric taxa such as "Cosesaurus", "Kadimakara", "Trachelosaurus", and "Malerisaurus". Analyses based on parsimony-based and Bayesian methods found that "Dinocephalosaurus" was a member of the Tanystropheidae, being the sister group to a clade containing "Tanystropheus", "Macrocnemus", "Langobardisaurus", and "Tanytrachelos". The analyses also recovered a monophyletic Protorosauria, albeit to the exclusion of "Prolacerta". The tree from the parsimony-based analysis is reproduced above, at right.