Pteridium aquilinum was well-known to botanists in pre-Linnaean times, and Linnaeus (1753) cited older European literature sources in his description of Pteris aquilina. Maximilian Kuhn (1879), who studied pteridophyte specimens made during the African expedition of Baron Carl Claus von der Decken, determined that Pteris aquilina was best transferred to Pteridium, which had been described as a genus without a list of constituent species by Scopoli (1760). Pteridium aquilinum is thus the type species of the genus Pteridium Gled. ex Scop.