A specimen of Digitalis transiens collected at around 2,000 metres in altitude near Aït Mesan in the Atlas Mountains by Johannes Justus Rein and Karl Fritsch during their excursion to Morocco in the early 1870s had been misidentified as D. atlantica, and using that misidentification, in 1878 the Irish botanist John Ball then synonymised D. atlantica to D. lutea in error.[6][7]