In 1846, John E. Gray described the species as Lagenorhynchus electra from a skull in the Natural History Museum (formerly the British Museum—NHMUK 1844.19.5.3), collected from an unknown locality (Gray, 1846). The description was quite brief, but the illustration shows that this is the species we now know as the melon-headed whale. Dawbin et al. (1970) provided a more detailed description of the type and illustrations from several different views. Gray (1846) described another skull of this species in the same publication as Lagenorhynchus asia, thinking it was a different species. Besides L. asia, there are three other junior synonyms: Phocaena pectoralis Peale, 1849, Delphinus (Lagenorhynchus) fusiformis Owen, 1866, and Electra obtusa Gray, 1868. As other studies suggested that the species was not closely related with the genus Lagenorhynchus, it was later assigned to its own genus, initially Electra, by Nakajima and Nishiwaki (1965), and later, after finding that Electra was preoccupied by a species of bryozoan, Peponocephala, by Nishiwaki and Norris (1966). This represents the first use of the present name combination.
