The bird essentially remained known only from this single specimen for more than 100 years. Emilia Snethlage around 1926 mentions a probable pair in the Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro and indeed, ""Nemosia rourii"" appears in an 1876 collection catalog (Bauer "et al." 2000). So it seems that two more birds were shot between 1870 and 1876 by de Rourer, or by an undetermined collector at an unknown date before 1876, possibly even before 1870. In 1940 however these could not be located anymore (Schneider "fide" Pacheco & Bauer 1995). Helmut Sick on August 8, 1941, observed a group of 8 near Itarana, but no further action was taken; Sick, later to become one of the foremost experts on Neotropical ornithology, had only arrived in Brazil two years earlier, and knew little if anything about "N. rourei" (which was not usually mentioned in the ornithological literature). It was not until his examination of the type specimen in 1976 that he realized what he had seen 35 years earlier (Sick 1979, 119).