The red steenbras was first formally described in 1830 as Dentex rupestris by the French zoologist Achille Valenciennes in Histoire naturelle des poissons which he wrote with Georges Cuvier.

[3] In 1938 the South African ichthyologist James Leonard Brierley Smith places D. rupestris in a new monospecific genus, Petrus.

[5] The red steenbras has the generic name Petrus which comes from the Greek petra, meaning "rock", and is thought to be a reference to the rocky habitat preferred by this species.

[2] The red steenbras is endemic to South Africa where it occurs from Table Bay in the Western Cape to St Lucia, KwaZulu-Natal.

[1] The red steenbras was an important recreational and commercial fisheries target in South Africa but in 2012 a moratorium was placed on its fishing.

Illegal fishing, particularly targeting spawning schools, continues to pose a serious threat to this species and hold back the recovery of its population.

[9] As the red steenbras is a long-lived, slow growing and late maturing species that has been overfished in the past and there has been no indication that the stock has recovered the International Union for Conservation of Nature have classified it as Endangered and state that it almost reaches the threshold of being classified as Critically Endangered, calling for research into the true status of the population and to measure the effectiveness of the moratorium on fishing.