A liverwort, flattened, adhering tightly to the surface, which is usually tree bark or bare wood. Stems branching freely and spreading to form roughly circular patches. Leaves are on alternating sides of the stem. Leaves and stem are reddish brown, although they can be green in the shade. Stems plus leaves are about one half to one millimeter wide.

The image at lower right was taken under a compound microscope at100x magnification. It shows a leaf, which can be seen to be double, with an upper lobe and a smaller lower lobe folded underneath. The lower lobe is shaped like a helmet; in the micrograph you can see the opening of the helmet at lower left. This shape allows the lobe to hold water to slow down desiccation during dry spells. This is an important adaptation for plants living on tree bark, which is a desert between rain storms.

Liverwort biologists call this kind of leaf complicate bilobed. The term bilobed means having two lobes, and complicate means folded (plicate) together (com-). Additionally, there is another row of tiny leaves, the underleaves, along the bottom of the stem. You can see an underleaf sticking out to either side of the stem at the upper left in the micrograph

.Very common in Wildwood on tree bark and fence rails.

Gray's Scalewort (Frullania asagrayana) is very similar and could be present in the Park. It is a little bit larger (1 to 2 mm wide), usually more reddish or pinkish, and differs in microscopic characters.

Gray's Scalewort is named for the botanist Asa Gray who first collected New York Scalewort in New York. Eboracum is Latin for the town of York, England.