 The longnose pygmy shark was described by American zoologist Henry Weed Fowler in a 1934 volume of "Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia", based on a long female collected off Point Ocean Beach in Durban, South Africa.Fowler had originally thought the shark to belong to the genus "Heteroscymnus" (a junior synonym of "Somniosus"), and thus he created for it the new genus "Heteroscymnoides" from the Greek "oidos" ("resemblance").He gave it the specific epithet "marleyi" in honor of Harold Walter Bell-Marley, and his contributions to the study of South African fishes.