Carl Linnaeus named the species Paradisaea apoda, or "legless bird-of-paradise", because early trade skins to reach Europe were prepared without wings or feet by the indigenous New Guinean people; this led to the misconception that these birds were beautiful visitors from paradise that were kept aloft by their plumes and never touched the earth until death.

[3] The greater bird-of-paradise was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the current binomial name Paradisaea apoda.

[4] The genus name is from the Late Latin paradisus meaning "paradise", due to the voyagers in Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the Earth, the first Europeans to encounter this animals.

[5] Antonio Pigafetta, the main chronicler of that expedition, wrote that "The people told us that those birds came from the terrestrial paradise, and they call them bolon diuata, that is to say, 'birds of God'.

The male birds also have an iridescent-green face, with an equally iridescent yellow-and-silver crown, head, and nape; the rest of the body plumage is largely maroon-brown.

A small population was introduced by Sir William Ingram in 1909-1912 to Little Tobago Island of West Indies in an attempt to save the species from extinction due to overhunting for plume trades.

Fruits are swallowed whole, and the seeds are passed intact through the digestive system before ultimately being excreted with the bird's guano, within which they will germinate from the nitrogen and other elements present.

Wallace noted, in The Malay Archipelago, that the birds become active and forage in the pre-dawn hours before sunrise, when their loud wawk-wawk, wǒk-wǒk-wǒk cries resound throughout the forest, and they move about in different directions in their pursuit of food.