Only two adult male specimens are known of this bird, held in the British Natural History Museum (BMNH) and the Dresden Natural History Museum, and presumably deriving from the Vogelkop Peninsula of north-western New Guinea.

[1] In 1930, Erwin Stresemann inspected both specimens and declared Elliot's Bird of Paradise to be an intergeneric hybrid between a black sicklebill and Arfak astrapia.

Errol Fuller argues that the astrapia is a fanciful choice made with little supporting evidence, and that Elliot's Bird of Paradise is much smaller than the two proposed parent species.

[2] As recently as 2012, Julian Hume and Michael Walters suggested that it is likely the elusive bird is either rare or extinct.

[3] In 2024 a study which extracted DNA from the BMNH specimen confirmed that the astrapia parentage is incorrect, but revealed it to actually be an F1 hybrid between a long-tailed paradigalla and a black sicklebill.