[2] R. bipunctatus is a smallish tree frog with a pointed snout and body length of about 37–60 mm when adult, with females being larger than males.

It is not known whether the true R. bipunctatus occurs across the whole of Southeast Asia like R. rhodopus; the available data indicate it is only known with certainty from a rather restricted area in the hills and mountains of the India-China-Myanmar border region, but the status of the similar frogs from Pahang in Malaysia needs to be determined.

Believed at its discovery in 1870 to represent a population of the black-webbed tree frog (Rhacophorus reinwardtii),[6] it was first described in 1871 as R. maculatus by John Anderson.

[9] But in 1927, Ernst Ahl realized the frog described by Wilhelm Peters as Leptomantis bimaculata in 1867[10] was also a member of Rhacophorus and thus Boulenger's replacement name was also preoccupied.

[11] Ahl solved the issue by establishing the currently valid name, Rhacophorus bipunctatus, for the frog species that had first come to the notice of scientists 50 years earlier.

That was still fortuitous, however, as they did not compare their "new" species to frogs assigned to the taxon R. namdaphaensis (as they might have wanted to, given the similarities and close geographic proximity).

In any case, this situation was resolved in 2007, when the differences between R. htunwini and the original R. bipunctatus were found to be too slight and varied too much between individuals to consider the former anything but a junior synonym of the latter.

Thus, the failure to compare R. rhodopus with the original type specimens of R. bipunctatus led to the long-known species being described once again under a new name, more than 130 years after it first became known to science.