[4][5]Aboriginal legend recorded in 1894 by Carl Strehlow describes "gods from the north" bringing the seeds to Palm Valley, which accords with the more modern research.

[2] Mueller did not designate a holotype, but a lectotype was selected by Tony Rodd in his 1998 revision of the Australian members of the genus Livistona, from among the two specimen sheets at the Melbourne herbarium attributed to Giles.

[10] In his 2009 monograph on the entire genus Livistona, however, John Leslie Dowe, one of the authors mentioned, once again recognised L. rigida as an independent species, rejecting Rodd's interpretation for the time being because he had stated it was provisional, and because he noted a number of morphological differences.

[11] Research that concluded a human agency introduced the plants to the area has resulted in changes to the population's taxonomic treatment and, consequently, required reappraisal of their conservation status as a species naturalised around 15,000 years ago rather than an endemic persisting since the Miocene era.

The isolation of the population was supposed to have resulted from the increased aridity of the continent since the Miocene period, around fifteen million years before the present day, or conveyed by a river or other means of dispersal.

Exclusion of other potential means for the introduction of the palm to the region, such as fruit bats or other mechanisms of distribution, left the most parsimonious explanation that it had been subject to dispersal by humans.

[13] In the Palm Valley a subsurface aquifer has provided constant moisture to the groves, in an area surrounded by extremes of climate, and the trees occupy niches within the landscape that insulate them from periodic flooding.

The surface pattern of the trunk is regular and neat in appearance, a feature of the persistent leaf bases of the earlier growth, and the width gradually narrows toward the crown.

[9] The significance of these palms was recognised in a national conservation plan intended to improve the trajectory of thirty Australian plants, actions that would reduce factors that threaten the trees with extinction.

[17] A large number of the trees are protected by occurring within the Finke Gorge National Park, some fringing groves of the palm are found on pastoral land and tourist areas and are subject to separate conservation actions.