The spotted pardalote (Pardalotus punctatus) is a small passerine bird native to eastern and southern Australia, at elevations of up to 2,000 metres (6,600 ft).

Although moderately common in all of the reasonably fertile parts of Australia (the east coast, the south-east, and the south-west corner) it is seldom seen closely enough to enable identification.

[5] Indigenous people from lowlands and Perth districts of southern Western Australia knew it as widopwidop and bilyabit, though the terms were also used for the striated pardalote.

[9] The yellow-rumped pardalote (P. punctatus xanthopyge) was considered for many years to be a separate species native to dryer inland southern Australia.

Amateur ornithologist Edward Pierson Ramsay, then 24 years old, recorded that a specimen at the Australian Museum that had been collected by John Leadbeater near the Murray River differed in its plumage from the typical spotted pardalote.

The director of the museum, Gerard Krefft, lent the specimen to Ramsay to describe, which he did as Pardalotus chrysoprymnus in a manuscript on 10 December 1866.

Meanwhile, Professor Frederick McCoy of the National Museum of Natural History and Geology in Melbourne also published a description of the species from a specimen collected near Swan Hill, in The Australasian newspaper on 29 December 1866, which was formally described on 1 March 1867.

[10] In a 1983 paper, Lester Short and colleagues noted the similarity of plumage and calls between the two taxa and occurrence of hybrid specimens from Victoria where the two forms overlapped.

[9] The Wet Tropics spotted pardalote (Pardalotus punctatus militaris) is found in coastal central-northern Queensland.

[1] Spotted pardalotes breed between August or September to December or January—generally earlier in the year in northern parts of their range and later in southern areas.