 As the name "Apterornis" had already been used for a different bird by the English biologist Richard Owen, the French biologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte coined the new binomial "Cyanornis erythrorhynchus" in 1857.The German ornithologist Hermann Schlegel moved the species to the swamphen genus instead, as "Porphyrio" ("Notornis") "caerulescens", indicating an affinity with the takahe (now "Porphyrio hochstetteri") of New Zealand.The American ornithologist Storrs L. Olson found the old accounts consistent with an endemic purple swamphen derivative, and considered it a probable species whose remains might one day be discovered.