The CMS was discovered by M. Graham Netting and Leonard Llewellyn on White Top, a summit of Cheat Mountain in Randolph County in 1935. It was described (and named) by N. Bayard Green in 1938. This salamander and the Peaks of Otter salamander (P. hubrichti), which has a similarly restricted range in Virginia, were once considered subspecies of a single species -- Netting's salamander—but since 1979 they (along with the Shenandoah salamander, P. shenandoah) have been considered separate, full species. Their ranges were both probably much larger in the past. (The circumstances surrounding the discovery and formal description of the CMS are related by Maurice Brooks in his classic natural history book, The Appalachians (1965).)