The bird was described in 1870 from a single specimen, an adult male shot by naturalist Jean de Roure and sent by Carl Euler to describer Jean Cabanis, who gave it its scientific name honoring the collector. At the time its discovery, the bird was neither known to the veteran collector de Roure, nor to anyone else Euler asked about it. The type specimen was deposited in the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde where it still resides (specimen MNHB 20326), luckily surviving the destruction of much of the MNHB collection in World War II.