acerosum D. densum D. filifolium D. kirkii D. ophioliticum D. patens D. rosmarinifolium D. trimorphum D. arboreum D. longifolium D. muscoides D. pronum D. scoparium D. strictum D. fiordense D. menziesii D. latifolium D. townsonii D. traversii other Dracophyllum spp.

D. muscoides was first described in 1864 by Joseph Dalton Hooker in his Handbook of the New Zealand Flora from a specimen collected by Hector and Buchanan 7 - 8000 ft up in the alps near Otago.

[1][3] He claimed that it was closely allied to D. minimum, however W. R. B. Oliver, the first person to attempt to arrange the genus Dracophyllum taxonomically, didn't totally agree.

[4] In 2010 a team of several botanists, including Stephanus Venter, published an article on the genus Dracophyllum in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

In it they performed a cladistic analysis and produced a phylogenetic tree of the tribe Richeeae and other species using genetic sequencing.

They found that only the subgenus Oreothamnus as well as the tribe Richeeae were monophyletic and that D. muscoides is contained within a Paraphyletic group with D. pronum and others.