Anderson (1875: 282) originally introduced the nomen Pteromys yunanensis for the Yunnan flying squirrel and later (Anderson 1879: 282) redescribed it as Pteromys yunnanensis, likely to fit with the alternative English spelling ‘Yunnan’ for the name of this Chinese province. Subsequently this species was transferred to the genus Petaurista Link, 1795 by Robinson & Kloss (1918: 173), which includes many recognized species and subspecies. Later on, it was considered a synonym of either Petaurista petaurista (Pallas, 1766) or Petaurista philippensis (Elliot, 1839) in subsequent taxonomic revisions (Ellerman & Morrison-Scott 1951; Corbet & Hill 1992; Thorington & Hoffmann 2006) until recent molecular phylogenetic analyses found it to be a separate species (Yu et al. 2006). More recent phylogenetic analyses have confirmed its species rank (e.g., Oshida et al. 2010; Casanovas-Vilar et al. 2018) and recent revisions have considered it a distinct species (Jackson 2012; Jackson & Thorington 2012; Koprowski et al. 2016).
Food Habits of the Indian Giant Flying Squirrel (Petaurista philippensis) in a Rain Forest Fragment, Western Ghats