The first description of this underlying holotype is in the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen University taken from a female collected from India. In following years there appeared more descriptions with different names. In 1805, Palisot de Beauvois designated a specimen from Nigeria as Libellula viridula. Around 1823 the British entomologist Dale, in an unpublished manuscript, described an allegedly Norfolk-trapped male as Libellula sparing halli, It is now in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. In 1839, the German entomologist Burmeister named a male collected in Madras as Libellula analis (now in the Zoological Collection of the University of Halle-Wittenberg) and another male from Brazil as Libellula terminalis (now in the Natural History Museum of Vienna.) In 1910, the field was cleared as Richard Anthony Muttkowski recognized that these species were all synonyms. A description made of Sympetrum tandicola (Singh) 1955 from a male collected in the Himalayas and deposited at the Zoological Survey India, Calcutta, was identified as belonging to Pantala flavescens in 1973.