 In 1908, the pyjama shark was made the type species of the genus by American zoologist Henry Weed Fowler.A bottom-dwelling inhabitant of temperate inshore waters, the pyjama shark is found off South Africa, from Table Bay off Cape Town to north of East London.It is most abundant off the Western Cape, and may venture as far as Saldanha Bay in the west and KwaZulu-Natal in the east; old records from Mauritius, Madagascar, and Zaire are almost certainly erroneous.