 The English zoologist William Alexander Forbes, believing that "mascarinus" was invalid as a specific name, since it was identical to the genus name, coined the new name "Mascarinus duboisi" in 1879, in honour of Dubois.The binomial name was emended from "M. mascarinus" to "M. mascarin" by the IOC World Bird List in 2016, to conform with how other species epithets by Linnaeus have been treated.An unidentified dark parrot seen alive by the Swedish naturalist Fredrik Hasselqvist in Africa was given the name "Psittacus obscurus" by Linnaeus in 1758, who again synonymised it with the Mascarene parrot in 1766.