Glyptothorax is a most species-diverse but poorly knowing catfish genus in Sisoridae. There are about 80 valid species widely distributed throughout the entire southern arc of the Asian continent. Wu et al. (1981) described G. zanaensis from Zana in the Nujiang (upper Salween River) drainage in Tibet. This species was not mentioned in Li’s (1984) review of the Chinese Glyptothorax, in which G. longinema from Liuku Township in the Nujiang drainage and G. rubermentus from Wayao Township in the Lancangjiang drainage were described. Mo & Chu (1986) subsequently considered these two nominal species as synonyms of G. zanaensis. Subsequent studies have followed the result of Mo & Chu (1986), in considering G. zanaensis to be a species widely distributed from the Nujiang eastwards to the Lancangjiang drainages.

Preliminary work of the phylogeny of Glyptothorax (Jiang et al., 2011) promoted by members in Systematic Zoology and Biogeography (Wan-Sheng Jiang, Jun-Xing Yang & Xiao-Yong Chen) and Singapore Ichthyologist (Heok Hee Ng) revealed that the catfish original identified as G. zanaensis might included more than one species. Considering of the observation of morphologic differences in different locations in the field surveys and specimens identification, researchers reanalyzed the G. zanaensis complex using the methods that combined the traditional morphologic measurements and truss-based measurements with principal components analysis, as well as molecular methods. The study redescribes G. zanaensis, revalidates and redescribes G. longinema, and describes the two unnamed species from the Nujiang (upper Salween) drainage as Glyptothorax granosus and Glyptothorax fucatus. This result has been published in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society [ 2012, 165, 363–389. ] recently.