The white-bellied cuckooshrike was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[7] This species exhibits a short black mask extending from the beak to the eyes (lores) but not beyond with a fine white rear eye-ring.

[8][9] The head and upperparts including upper wings are pale blue-grey with tail feathers tending towards darker grey.

[8][9][10] The subspecies Coracina papuensis robusta can present with a dark morph that has extensive black plumage on the neck and chest that can be barred at the edges.

[11] The white-bellied cuckooshrike range includes parts of Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

[9] The nest consists of a shallow cup made from a combination of grass, fine twigs, bark, leaves and vine tendrils bound together with spider webs and decorated with lichen.

[10] They predominantly feed on larger insects like dragonflies (Odonata), cockroaches (Blattodea), mantids (Mantodea), grasshoppers (Orthoptera), bugs (Hemiptera), beetles (Coleoptera), stick-insects (Phasmatidae), lepidopteran larvae, and ants and wasps (Hymenoptera).

[10] The white-bellied cuckooshrike has an extremely large range appearing throughout Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Moluccas.