The fruit is a 1 to 1.5 centimeter long dry ovoid capsule that splits open when ripe.

It has been recorded in Alabama, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Vermont, and West Virginia.

[8] The species now known as Aureolaria virginica was first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753, who named it Rhinanthus virginicus.

In the 19th century, botanists renamed both species, which were now understood to belong to the same genus, several times, resulting in numerous synonyms.

In the early 20th century Francis W. Pennell discovered that the downy species known at that time as Dasystoma flava actually matched the original description of Linnaeus' Rhinanthus virginicus, and the smooth species known then as Dasystoma virginica actually matched the original description of Linnaeus' Gerardia flava.

Pennell realized that an error had been made by 19th century botanists such as Caspar Wistar Eddy and Frederick Traugott Pursh, and so in keeping with botanical naming conventions, he restored the specific epithets of the basionyms to the original species to which they had applied.

Unfortunately, some resources, particularly those functioning as aggregators of large quantities of information, including materials which may be out of date, have perpetuated the confusion, such as a public domain botanical illustration of Dasystoma virginica from 1913[11] which was mislabeled as Aureolaria virginica on the USDA website,[12] and later uploaded to Wikipedia.