The first scientist to mention the species was
Antoine Laurent Apollinaire Fée in 1852, who referred to it as
Pellaea chilensis without offering a
species description (making that name a
nomen nudum), but noted that
Jules Rémy, who was preparing a flora of Chile, considered it to belong to
Lindsaea, in the sense used by
Desvaux. Rémy published his flora the following year, in the sixth botanical volume of
Claude Gay's
Historia fisica y politica de Chile, and described the species as
Cincinalis chilensis, attributing that name to Fée. While he did not explain his choice of epithet, it presumably reflects the Chilean origin of the specimens he examined. The location of the type material is not known. In 1858,
Johann Wilhelm Sturm transferred it into a broadly-construed genus
Notholaena as
N. chilensis.
Carl Christensen, by contrast, assigned it to
Pellaea as
P. chilensis in his
Index Filicum of 1906. In 1856,
Edward Joseph Lowe described a fern being cultivated in Britain under the name of
Notholaena nivea which, however, had a broader blade, more heavily dissected and with more leaf tissue, than the leaves of true
N. nivea. He was unable to find a corresponding specimen in the
herbarium at
Kew, and described it as a new species, which he called
Notholaena hookeri, in honor of
William Jackson Hooker. He attributed its introduction to British cultivation to John Riley, of
Papplewick. In 1866,
John Smith transferred it to
Cincinalis as
C. hookeri. The name "
N. hookeri" was mistakenly reused by
Daniel Cady Eaton;
William Ralph Maxon, when devising the replacement name of
Notholaena standleyi for Eaton's fern in 1915, opined that
N. hookeri, as named by Eaton, was simply a synonym of
N. nivea.
Rolla M. Tryon Jr. designated a specimen of Riley's cultivation at Kew as the
lectotype for
N. hookeri, and concluded that it was in fact synonymous with
N. chilensis. While Tryon, when finishing
Charles Alfred Weatherby's revision of American
Notholaena, considered it impossible to reasonably subdivide
Notholaena into sections based on the data available at the time, both
Edwin Copeland and Weatherby himself had suggested in the 1940s that a group of ferns related to
N. nivea might represent a distinct genus. This was finally addressed in 1987 by
Michael D. Windham, who was carrying out phylogenetic studies of these genera. He elevated
Notholaena sect.
Argyrochosma to become the genus
Argyrochosma, and transferred this species to that genus as
A. chilensis. In 2018,
Maarten J. M. Christenhusz transferred the species to
Hemionitis as
H. chilensis, as part of a program to consolidate the cheilanthoid ferns into that genus. He also transferred
N. hookeri, as
H. hookeri. A phylogenetic analysis including a single specimen of
A. chilensis found it nested within a clade representing
A. nivea sensu lato. It probably evolved by the dispersal of
A. nivea to
Robinson Crusoe Island, followed by
anagenesis creating
A. chilensis and its spread to the younger
Alejandro Selkirk Island. ==Distribution and habitat==