[10] Léveillé's M. fragile had several intermediate taxonomic placements[11] before María H. Homrich and Jorge E. Wright assigned it the genus Gastropila in 1973.

[12] According to some sources, Calvatia pachyderma and Gastropila fragilis are synonymous,[3][4] which was argued as early as 1915 Curtis Gates Lloyd but specifically debunked by María H. Homrich and Jorge Eduardo Wright in 1974.

[15] According to Kreisel, "Most species of Calvatia live in dry or mesophilic grassland, in arctic-alpine meadows, or in semi-desertic vegetation, some in gardens and cultivated soils.

[17] The thick-skinned puffball is primarily a spring mushroom (in the Northern Hemisphere), but also can be found at the beginning of the rainy season in the fall.

[21] The skin of C. booniana breaks up in "polygonal or irregular-shaped patches" while C. pachyderma often develops vertical/longitudinal cracks at the "apical portions of the gasterocarp" and then pulls away from the gleba in fairly large plates.

[23] Similar mushrooms that are contended, in some papers, and disputed in others, to be the same species, have been found in "high altitudes of Iran and Nepal,"[8] South Africa,[24] Russia, Bulgaria, Turkmenistan, [4] Chile,[25] et al.

In 1882, Charles Horton Peck described this species as "Subglobose, four to six inches in diameter, the radicating base somewhat pointed, the external peridium thin, smooth, whitish, the upper part cracking into small angular persistent spot-like scales or areas, the inner peridium thick, sub corky, somewhat brittle, the upper part at length breaking up into irregular fragments; capillitium and spores ochraceous-brown, the filaments long, flexuous, somewhat branched, .0003 of an inch spores subglobose or broadly elliptical, .0002-.00025 of an inch long.

[19] Initially white or whitish,[28] as it expands it can become various shades of gray or brown and develop a texture described as "scaly or more often like cracked mud.

One review of North American gasteromycetes described C. pachyderma as having "Peridium single, or at least not separable into two distinct layers, thick; gleba bright olivaceous.