The fungus, widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere, has been found in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Australia.

The saprobic fungus grows on decaying sticks and branches in damp spots on forest floors, generally buried under leaf litter or in the soil.

Molliardiomyces eucoccinea is the name given to the imperfect form of the fungus that lacks a sexually reproductive stage in its life cycle.

[1] Obligate synonyms (different names for the same species based on one type) include Lachnea coccinea Gillet (1880),[11] Macroscyphus coccineus Gray (1821),[12] and Peziza dichroa Holmskjold (1799).

Within the large area that includes the temperate to alpine-boreal zone of the Northern Hemisphere (Europe and North America), only S. coccinea had been recognized until the 1980s.

[22][24] Her cladistic analysis combined comparisons of the sequences of the internal transcribed spacer in the non-functional RNA with fifteen traditional morphological characteristics, such as spore features, fruit body shape, and degree of curliness of the "hairs" that form the tomentum.

[18] Color variants of the fungus exist that have reduced or absent pigmentation; these forms may be orange, yellow, or even white (as in the variety albida).

[26] Sarcoscypha coccinea is one of several fungi whose fruit bodies have been noted to make a "puffing" sound—an audible manifestation of spore-discharge where thousands of asci simultaneously explode to release a cloud of spores.

[27] Spores are 26–40 by 10–12 μm, elliptical, smooth, colorless, hyaline (translucent), and have small lipid droplets concentrated at either end.

[30] The paraphyses (sterile filamentous hyphae present in the hymenium) are about 3 μm wide (and only slightly thickened at the apex), and contain red pigment granules.

[31] Anamorphic or imperfect fungi are those that seem to lack a sexual stage in their life cycle, and typically reproduce by the process of mitosis in structures called conidia.

The International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants permits the recognition of two (or more) names for one and the same organism, one based on the teleomorph, the other(s) restricted to the anamorph.

Molliard found the growth of the conidia to resemble those of the genera Coryne and Chlorosplenium rather than the Pezizaceae, and he considered that this suggested an affinity between Sarcoscypha and the family Helvellaceae.

This form produces colorless conidiophores (specialized stalks that bear conidia) that are usually irregularly branched, measuring 30–110 by 3.2–4.7 μm.

[25] A saprobic species,[39] Sarcoscypha coccinea grows on decaying woody material from various plants: the rose family, beech, hazel, willow, elm, and, in the Mediterranean, oak.

[41] A Hungarian study noted that the fungus was found mainly on twigs of European hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) that were typically less than 5 cm (2.0 in) long.

[45] Common over much of the Northern Hemisphere, S. coccinea occurs in the Midwest, in the valleys between the Pacific coast, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascade Range.

A lectin has been purified and characterized from S. coccinea fruit bodies that can bind selectively to several specific carbohydrate molecules, including lactose.

The fungus, after being dried and ground up into a powder, was applied as a styptic, particularly to the navels of newborn children that were not healing properly after the umbilical cord had been severed.