Its most striking features are two pairs of long white plumes coming out from the bend of the wing that can be raised or lowered at the bird's will.

When the voyagers were at Tidore in December 1521, they were offered a gift of beautiful dead birds by the ruler of Bacan to give to the King of Spain.

An alternate account by Maximilianus Transylvanus introduced the term manucodiata (a corruption of the Malay manute-dewata; "bird of the gods"), used for birds-of-paradise up to the 19th century.

[2] Writing in his 1869 travelogue, The Malay Archipelago, Wallace described his first encounter:[3]“Just as I got home I overtook Ali returning from shooting with some birds hanging from his belt.

No further sightings were reported until the British ornithologist David Bishop rediscovered the species in 1983 and began making the first detailed observations of its behaviour.

[5] In 2018, David Attenborough was invited to place one of the standardwing bird-of-paradise from Wallace's collection in its display as part of the reopening ceremony for the redeveloped Cambridge University Museum of Zoology.