The leaves, which are up to 15 mm (0.6 in) long, are silvery, and deeply lobed into nine or more soft, hairy laciniae about half a millimetre in diameter.

The flowers, which appear throughout the year, have a pink to red (or rarely yellow) perianth and a style up to 30 mm long.

[4] Early botanical collectors of this taxon include Ferdinand von Mueller and Frederick George Waterhouse.

Early in the 1970s, Ernest Charles Nelson began investigating the question of why there are so many plant species with disjunct distribution patterns in southern Australia.

brevifolia warranted species rank, primarily because leaves are much smaller and have fewer laciniae than the Western Australian A. sericea.

In 1978 he published a new description of the taxon, giving it species rank with the name Adenanthos macropodiana, and synonymizing A. sericea var.

By this time, the ICBN had issued a ruling that all genera ending in -anthos must be treated as having masculine gender; thus the specific epithet became macropodianus.