This is one of the 12 constellations introduced into the southern skies at the end of the 16th century by the Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman. Pavo probably represents not the common blue, or Indian, peacock commonly seen in parks but its larger, more colourful, and more aggressive cousin, the Java green peacock which Keyser and de Houtman would have encountered in the East Indies. Pavo was first depicted in 1598 on a globe by Petrus Plancius and first appeared in print in 1603 on the Uranometria atlas of Johann Bayer.
Pavo flourishes a truncated tail in the Uranographia of Johann Bode (1801).