The first description of D. cinnabari was made during a survey of Socotra led by Lieutenant Wellsted of the East India Company in 1835. It was first named Pterocarpus draco, but in 1880, the Scottish botanist Isaac Bayley Balfour made a formal description of the species and renamed it as Dracaena cinnabari.[3] Of between 60 and 100 Dracaena species, D. cinnabari is one of only 6 species which grow as a tree.[4]