Each flower head consists of an involucre, 5–6 mm (0.20–0.24 in) high, with several whorls of lanceolate bracts narrowing into the tip, with papery edges, and contains mostly five, sometimes four or six, hermaphrodite creamy white ligulate florets 3.7 cm (1.5 in) long, ending in five shallow, but irregular lobes.

The indehiscent one-seeded fruits (called cypselas) are 2 mm (0.08 in) long, covered in velvety hairs, and are adorned by ten longitudinal ribs.

[6] Catamixis baccharoides was described by Thomas Thomson in 1867, who thought it was most closely related to Leucomeris, a genus that is now assigned to the subfamily Wunderlichioideae, tribe Hyalideae.

Because it shares the combination of ligulate florets, spurred anthers, and involucres that consist of several whorls of overlapping bracts, the species was initially assigned to the tribe Mutisieae sensu lato, but genetic analysis has since shown that this grouping constitutes a basal evolutionary grade, which has been consequently divided into nine subfamilies.

Catamixis lacks a deletion of 17 base pairs close to one of the chloroplast NADH dehydrogenase genes, that is a common character for members of the subfamilies Gymnarrhenoideae, Cichorioideae, Corymbioideae and Asteroideae.

[8] The name Catamixis is a contraction of the Greek words κατά (kata) and μιξη (mixi), meaning “mixed affinity”, which refers to the combination of characters that makes it difficult to assign it based on morphology within the Asteraceae.

The species is habitat specific and grows on exposed, dry, sandstone or calcareous rocky cliffs of lower Shiwalik belt.