 Leonard Compagno, in his 1988 phenetic study, also grouped those species together, along with the smoothtooth blacktip shark ("C. leiodon") and the finetooth shark ("C. isodon").However, molecular phylogenetic techniques have since found this interpretation to be invalid for the spinner, blacktip, and finetooth sharks.The graceful shark is distributed widely in the tropical Indo-Pacific, having been reported from the Gulf of Aden, southwestern India and Sri Lanka, the Gulf of Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines to Borneo and Java, and Papua New Guinea to northern Australia from Townsville to Eighty Mile Beach.