In September 2006, biologists Juan Pablo López and Alexander Cortés Diago found two specimens in a cloud forest at an altitude of on the western side of the Serranía del Perijá in Colombia, but the information collected was insufficient to identify a new species. Between July 2008 and February 2009, sixteen new specimens were collected in an area previously explored by Carriker. New vocal, morphological, genetic, and ecological studies of these specimens confirmed that they constituted a new species, Scytalopus perijanus, first described by Jorge Enrique Avendaño et al. on 11 March 2015 following a three-year expedition, and accepted by the South American Classification Committee. The Latin word perijanus refers to the Serranía del Perijá mountain range, and the genus name Scytalopus comes from the Greek skutale (stick) and pous (foot).