[4] It is black in color, with a covering of long, straight, matted whitish or yellowish hairs,[4] and the upper surface is rounded.

[3] On fertile fronds, the sori are protected by false indusia formed by the edge of the leaf curling back over the underside.

[6] The species was first described in 1843 by Samuel Botsford Buckley, based on material collected from limestone rocks on the banks of the Tennessee River at the foot of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Apparently unaware of this, John Leonard Riddell also published a description of Buckley's collections in 1853 under the name Pteris buckleyi.

[8] In 1847, Gustav Kunze (who had grown the plant from spore, provided by Ferdinand Rugel) transferred the species to the genus Cheilanthes as C. alabamensis.

[13] As part of his wide-ranging program of taxonomic revision, Otto Kuntze argued that the principle of priority precluded the use of the generic name Pellaea, and transferred the species to the older genus Allosorus in 1891.

[14] This combination was rendered unnecessary when Pellaea and Cheilanthes were conserved over Allosorus in the Paris Code published in 1956.

Convergent evolution in arid environments is thought to be responsible for widespread homoplasy in the morphological characters traditionally used to classify it and the segregate genera that have sometimes been recognized.

On the basis of molecular evidence, Amanda Grusz and Michael D. Windham revived the genus Myriopteris in 2013 for a group of species formerly placed in Cheilanthes.

[15] In 2018, Maarten J. M. Christenhusz transferred the species to Hemionitis as H. alabamensis, as part of a program to consolidate the cheilanthoid ferns into that genus.