The leaf blade is 4-pinnate at the base, grayish or silvery green on top and covered with rusty brown wooly hairs below.

It grows on rocky slopes and ledges, on a variety of acidic to mildly basic substrates, at elevations from 200 to 2500 m.[4] Myriopteris lindheimeri was first described by Sir William Jackson Hooker in 1852, as Cheilanthes lindheimeri, based on material collected by Ferdinand Lindheimer in western Texas in 1847.

[7] In 1891, John Gilbert Baker described a species he called Cheilanthes albida, based on the specimen Charles Christopher Parry & Edward Palmer 999, collected by those two botanists in Central Mexico.

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, such as Myriopteris, that have sometimes been recognized.

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