The fungus apothecia, which form in the epidermal layer of the leaf host, resemble dark hexagonal spots scattered on a multi-colored mosaic pattern bounded by thin black lines.

hexagonus, described by Otto Penzig and Saccardo from West Java, Indonesia in 1901,[5] is sometimes applied to western US collections with large six-sided apothecia.

However, its status is unclear, as the type is no longer in Saccardo's herbarium at the University of Padua, and Penzig's collection was destroyed during World War II.

C. dentatus f. lauri was described by Heinrich Rehm in 1901, for a collection found growing on a species of Lauraceae in Rio Grande do Sul (southern Brazil).

[11] In 1982, Enrique Descals described an aquatic hyphomycete Tricladiopsis flagelliformis growing from submerged leaves found in the shoreline of Windermere (Cumbria, England), which he tentatively assigned as the anamorph state of Coccomyces dentatus.

[12] The apothecia of Coccomyces dentatus are distributed in bleached spots that are bounded by a black lines inside the outer cell layer of the leaf (intraepidermal).

The paraphyses (sterile filamentous hyphal cells) are unbranched, threadlike (filiform), gradually enlarge to a width of 2.0 μm at the tip, and have granular contents.

Pycnidia (which appear before the apothecia mature) are intraepidermal, lenticular (having the shape of a double-convex lens) in cross section, 0.1–0.3 mm in diameter, and covered with a dark brown layer of cells.

[15] The species is frequently confused with Coccomyces coronatus, which has inflated paraphyses, longer asci and ascospores, less regularly shaped apothecia, and rarely occurs on leaves of evergreens.

However, the latter can be distinguished by the following characters: three- to four-sided ascocarps; ascospores with a single septum; and longer, wider asci measuring 110–135 by 10–14 μm.