[5] E. osburni lives in a system of rivers, streams, and creeks in the central Appalachian Mountains.

[1] E. osburni has a limited geographic range, it has been recorded in more than 10 locations and does not have a severely fragmented distribution, so it has been designated a near-threatened species on the IUCN Red List.

[1] E. osburni was first formally described as Poecilichthys osburni in 1932 by the American ichthyologists Carl Leavitt Hubbs and Milton Bernhard Trautman with the type locality given as Stony Creek which is a tributary of the Greenbrier River in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

[9] In 2023 E. osburni was featured on a United States Postal Service forever stamp as part of the Endangered Species set, based on a photograph from Joel Sartore's Photo Ark.

The stamp was dedicated at a ceremony at the National Grasslands Visitor Center in Wall, South Dakota.