Captain Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the British National Antarctic Expedition (BrNAE) (1901-1904), discovered the Drygalski Ice Tongue in January 1902 and named it for Prof. Erich von Drygalski, a contemporary German explorer then in Antarctica. The glacier that feeds the ice tongue was named after Edgeworth David. David and Douglas Mawson crossed the ice tongue in 1908/09 as part of the Nimrod Expedition. The name Drygalski Ice Tongue is unusual as it is now common to give the same name to a glacier and its glacier tongue and refer to the seaward extension as a glacier tongue.