The Galápagos mockingbird is one of four mockingbird species endemic to the Galápagos Islands. These four are all closely related, and DNA evidence shows they likely all descended from an ancestor species which reached the islands in a single colonization event. When John Gould first described the species in 1837, based on specimens brought back from the islands by Charles Darwin, he named it "Orpheus parvulus". However, because of the rules of binomial nomenclature, "Orpheus" was declared a junior synonym, and in 1841, George Robert Gray moved all of the "Orpheus" mockingbirds to the older genus "Mimus". In 1890, Robert Ridgway created the genus "Nesomimus" for the mockingbirds found on the Galápagos Islands, and most taxonomists adopted the change. Recent DNA studies, however, show that the "Nesomimus" mockingbirds fall within the traditional genus "Mimus", making the latter , so some taxonomists have moved them back into "Mimus".