The specimen had previously been described by Gerard Krefft in a communication to the Zoological Society of London, and had been forwarded to the Göttingen museum by Dr. Schuette. The description and illustration were presented to the society in 1879, accompanied by the suggestion that it was an unnamed genus of Phyllostomatidae (New World leaf-nosed bats); a member of the society, Edward Richard Alston, proposed instead it was a species of "Megaderma" which were unknown in Australia. The type locality is at the Wilson River near Mt Margaret in Queensland, where the collector, also named Wilson, obtained the bat. An earlier observation had been noted by Robert Austin in 1854 at Mount Kenneth while surveying the inland regions of Western Australia.