American herpetologist Olive Griffith Stull described this taxon as Liasis amethistinus kinghorni in 1933 from a specimen at the Museum of Comparative Zoology which had been collected at Lake Barrine in north Queensland, classifying it as a subspecies of the amethystine python based on its larger number of scales.

American biologist Michael Harvey and colleagues investigated the amethystine python complex and confirmed its classification as a separate species based on cladistic analysis of mitochondrial cytochrome b sequences and morphology.

[4] In 2014 cladistic analysis of nuclear and mitochondrial genes of pythons and boas, R. Graham Reynolds and colleagues concluded that the support for its distinctness was weak.

[citation needed] This snake has an ornate dorsal pattern consisting of browns and tans, with many different natural variations, and an iridescent sheen.

Dean also describes an extremely large specimen from Barron Falls in 1954 with a total length of 7.2 m (24 ft), which, however, consisted of an artificially stretched frame that decomposed in the tropics for more than two days, though it was considered reliable by the staff of the Guinness Book of World Records.

However, it is assumed that it was installed in 1990 by adult animals that escaped from the local zoo, and has been successfully distributed since then living within various forests and more densely vegetated parts of the Australian bush.

[16] S. kinghorni is one of the largest land predators in Australia, and depending on the habitat, age and size, the prey range can vary from small mammals, birds and reptiles to wallabies.

[8] Among them, for example, rainbow bee-eaters (Merops ornatus),[4] bush rats (Rattus fuscipes),[8] northern quolls (Dasyurus hallucatus),[18] spectacled flying fox (Pteropus conspicillatus), northern brown bandicoots (Isoodon macrourus),[8] long-nosed bandicoots (Perameles nasuta) and striped possums (Dactylopsila trivirgata).