This species was described as Bufo regularis rangeri, in 1935, by John Hewitt of the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, from collections made by naturalist Gordon A. Ranger at his farm "Gleniffer" 3 km E of Kei Road, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

[7] More recently, Frost and co-authors (2006) assigned this species to the new genus Amietophrynus, as part of a global revision of amphibian taxonomy based largely on DNA sequence data.

[8] Ohler and Dubois (2016) studied the type (and, previously, the only known) specimen of Sclerophrys capensis, collected in the Cape Province and described by Johann Jakob von Tschudi in 1838, and discovered that it belonged to the present species, then known as Amietophrynus rangeri.

If injured it will exude whitish spots of venom on the parotoid glands; this can be hazardous to domestic dogs if they bite a toad.

[4] It typically is shy, but like many toads it will visit houses and other places where insect prey are attracted to lights, mainly outside the breeding season.