They are angular and shaped roughly like a kidney, with a slanting point and stunted base.

[1] Hypecoum pendulum was first formally described by Carl Linnaeus in the first edition of Species Plantarum in 1753.

In it, he combined three previous names for the species and noted its habitat in "Galloprovincia", modern-day southern France.

Porfiry Krylov was the first to demote the species, assigning it the name H. pendulum ssp.

James Cullen demoted the species again to variety in 1966, noting that there was a series of intermediate forms between var.