In historic times, the bird seems to have occurred in two discrete relict populations: a smaller one in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula and a larger one in the area where today the borders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Syria meet.

[5] Mitochondrial DNA studies have shown a close relationship to the North African subspecies camelus, indicating there may have been intergradation between the two.

[7][8] In Mesopotamia, it was used as a sacrificial animal and featured in artwork, painted on cups and other objects made from ostrich eggs, traded as far as Etruria during the Neo-Assyrian period.

The Arabian ostrich was also discussed in Mesopotamian scholarly writings from the time of the Baghdad Caliphate, such as Zakariya al-Qazwini's cosmography 'Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa-ghara'ib al-mawjudat, the Kitab al-Hayawan ("Book of Animals") of Al-Jahiz, or Ibn Manzur's dictionary Lisan al-Arab.

Its main stronghold was the northern An Nafud northwards to the Syrian Desert, between latitudes 34°N and 25°N and longitude 38°E eastwards to the Euphrates Valley, and it was most plentiful in Al Jawf Province, where it associated with herds of Saudi gazelle and Arabian oryx, animals that are now extinct or very rare respectively.

Some of the last sightings include an individual east of the Tall al-Rasatin at the Jordanian-Iraqi border in 1928, a bird shot and eaten by pipeline workers in the area of Jubail in the early 1940s (some sources specifically state 1941), two apocryphal records of birds suffering the same fate in 1948, and a dying individual found in the upper Wadi al-Hasa north of Petra in 1966.

[13] Following analyses of mtDNA control region haplotypes that confirmed the close relationship of the Arabian and the North African subspecies,[14] a reintroduction project using S. c. camelus was set up in Saudi Arabia and Qatar in 1994.