The pelagic stingray was originally described by French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in the 1832 third volume of Iconografia della fauna italica per le quattro classi degli animali vertebrati.
Lisa Rosenberger's 2001 phylogenetic analysis, based on morphology, found that the pelagic stingray is one of the more basal members of its family, being the sister taxon to a clade that contains Pastinachus, Dasyatis, and Indo-Pacific Himantura species [REF].