In 1875, British ornithologist Alfred Newton attempted to identify a black-and-white bird mentioned in an 18th-century manuscript describing a marooned sailor's stay on the Mascarene island of Rodrigues in 1726–27, hypothesising that it was related to the hoopoe starling. Subfossil bones later found on Rodrigues were correlated with the bird in the manuscript; in 1879, these bones became the basis for a new species, "Necropsar rodericanus" (the Rodrigues starling), named by British ornithologists Albert Günther and Edward Newton. Günther and Newton found the Rodrigues bird closely related to the hoopoe starling, but kept it in a separate genus due to "present ornithological practice". American ornithologist James Greenway suggested in 1967 that the Rodrigues starling belonged in the same genus as the hoopoe starling, due to their close similarity. Subfossils found in 1974 confirmed that the Rodrigues bird was a distinct genus of starling; primarily, its stouter bill warrants generic separation from "Fregilupus". In 2014, British palaeontologist Julian P. Hume described a new extinct species, the Mauritius starling ("Cryptopsar ischyrhynchus"), based on subfossils from Mauritius, which was closer to the Rodrigues starling than to the hoopoe starling in its skull, sternal, and humeral features.