The animal was first found in 1831 by Luka Čeč, an assistant to the lamplighter in the Postojna Cave system in southwestern Slovenia, when exploring new inner cave portions discovered some year before.
He gave the specimen to count Earl Franz von Ho(c)henwart who was unable to determine the species, and gave it in turn to Ferdinand Josef Schmidt, a naturalist and entomologist from Ljubljana.
Schmidt recognized the beetle as a new species and described it in the article under the name "Beitrag zu Krain's Fauna" (Contribution to the fauna of Carniola) which appeared in the Carniolan paper Illyrisches Blatt in 1832.
He named it Leptodirus (which means "slender-necked (beetle)") hochenwartii after the donor, and also gave it the common Slovene name drobnovratnik and German Enghalskäfer, both related to its typical slender thorax.
The article represents the first formal description of a cave animal, since the olm (Proteus anguinus), described in 1768 by Josephus Nicolaus Laurenti, was not recognized as a cave animal at the time.
In 1856 the Russian entomologist Viktor Motchoulski described a new Leptodirus species, named L. schmidti, currently recognized as a subspecies of L. hochenwartii.

Subsequent research by Schmidt and other naturalists revealed further previously unknown cave inhabitants, which aroused considerable interest among cave researchers.
For this reason, the discovery of L. hochenwartii (along with the olm) is considered the starting point of biospeleology as a scientific discipline.
The animal was first found in 1831 by Luka Čeč, an assistant to the lamplighter in the Postojna Cave system in southwestern Slovenia, when exploring new inner cave portions discovered some year before. He gave the specimen to count Earl Franz von Ho(c)henwart who was unable to determine the species, and gave it in turn to Ferdinand Josef Schmidt, a naturalist and entomologist from Ljubljana. Schmidt recognized the beetle as a new species and described it in the article under the name "Beitrag zu Krain's Fauna" (Contribution to the fauna of Carniola) which appeared in the Carniolan paper Illyrisches Blatt in 1832. He named it Leptodirus (which means "slender-necked (beetle)") hochenwartii after the donor, and also gave it the common Slovene name drobnovratnik and German Enghalskäfer, both related to its typical slender thorax. The article represents the first formal description of a cave animal, since the olm (Proteus anguinus), described in 1768 by Josephus Nicolaus Laurenti, was not recognized as a cave animal at the time. In 1856 the Russian entomologist Viktor Motchoulski described a new Leptodirus species, named L. schmidti, currently recognized as a subspecies of L. hochenwartii.
Subsequent research by Schmidt and other naturalists revealed further previously unknown cave inhabitants, which aroused considerable interest among cave researchers. For this reason, the discovery of L. hochenwartii (along with the olm) is considered the starting point of biospeleology as a scientific discipline.
Leptodirus