The species came to the attention of the scientific community when explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell observed the trees on his expedition through Queensland in 1848 and published an account in "Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia" in the same year. He came across them as he ascended Mount Abundance near present-day Roma, remarking that "The trunk bulged out in the middle like a barrel, to nearly twice the diameter at the ground, or of that at the first springing of the branches above. These were small in proportion to their great girth, and the whole tree looked very odd In the same publication, English botanist John Lindley provided the first formal description. Lindley placed it in the genus "Delabechea" as the sole representative—"Delabechea rupestris". The genus name was selected by Mitchell to honor the director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, Henry De la Beche, while the Latin specific epithet "rupestris" (meaning living among rocks) alludes to the rocky hilltop habitat of specimens observed by Mitchell. Ferdinand von Mueller, the Government Botanist in Victoria, renamed it "Brachychiton delabechei" in 1862, incorporating the genus "Delabechea" into "Brachychiton".