The word bunga means flower; both names are shared by plants in the related genus Rafflesia.

[4] The flower is scentless when it first opens, but the odour soon grows fetid and rank, smelling of rotting carrion.

[5] These lobes are furthermore different by ending in a long hanging strips,[3] with its flesh colour and texture, the flower thus looking like a big, fat, dead octopus on its head.

The genus was first proposed to be renamed by Barthélemy Charles Joseph Dumortier in 1829 when he also first created the family Rafflesiaceae,[1][2] but this publication seems not to have been widely known.

[9] B. bakhuizenii was the third species, named by Emil Johann Lambert Heinricher after his 1903/04 trip to the island for a taxon with a different flower colour on Java.

[10][11] In 1934 Hermann Harms pointed out that Dumortier's name had priority,[1] but he only moved M. lowii to Rhizanthes,[12] not the type species of the genus Brugmansia.

lowii has been synonymised with the older species at least twice by different workers (Hooker in 1873, Bänziger in 1995), but this had been generally ignored by most people.

[3] Bänziger and Hansen were unsure of how applicable this was, finding the characters were inconsistent and did not clearly separate all of the specimens into geographically distinct groups, resolving to use a large group of morphological traits and the larger number of specimens which had since been collected to clear this up.

A number of characteristics were ambiguous, mixed or had ranges which overlapped with other groups, making them inadequate for differentiating taxa.

Notwithstanding this, however, they decided to recognised their groups at a species level, reasoning that regardless the phylogeny, it would be potentially more advantageous to recognise them as four rare endemics for environmental, financial and political reasons, giving spunky names to their new taxa: Rh.

[3] Rhizanthes zippelii appears to prefer to grow in the densest thickets in tropical rainforest on steep slopes, which is one reason it is little seen.