Summary:
Features include a minute rounded to top-shaped fruitbody with pale cream or whitish spore-bearing upper surface, the exterior thickly covered with brown hairs that overarch to cover the spore-bearing upper surface, either without a stem or narrowed in lower part into a short thick stem-like base; growth densely gregarious on wood; and microscopic characters including basidia. The Ninth Edition and Tenth Edition of Dictionary of the Fungi synonymize Cyphellopsis with Merismodes [which is in Niaceae]. MycoBank places this species in Marasmiaceae but MycoBank places it in Niaceae (both accessed June 7, 2014).

Microscopic:
spores 7-8.75 x 5-6.5 microns including apiculus, broadly elliptic to nearly round, colorless; basidia 4-spored, up to 28.6 x 10 microns, "broadly clavate, tapering to a very narrow base"; hyphal system monomitic, of generative hyphae 2-2.5 microns wide, colorless, thin-walled, branched, appearing to have clamp connections on some of the septa, these hyphae vertical in the stem-like base and diverging to form fleshy base of cup, toward outside of cup hyphae develop slightly thicker, brownish walls and become more highly branched, and from these arise numerous granule encrusted hairs, 2-3 microns wide, with "slightly thickened brown walls and strongly enrolled, crozier-like apices, the tips of which often become swollen and irregularly clavate or capitate"; clamp connections in this species tend to be abortive and often mere peg-like outgrowths near the septa, (Reid)

Notes:
It is found at least in BC, (Redhead), and Venezuela (Reid). There is a S. Redhead collection from BC at the University of British Columbia.

Synonyms and Alternate Names:
Cyathus niveotomentosa Henn.
Nidula microcarpa Peck in White