Pyramidal or conical very long-lived evergreen trees up to 30 m tall and 200 cm diam., with irregular shoot growth, mostly pendulous branches, and strong epicormic shoots from layered stems. Trees frequently multi-leadered, malformed, spiral-grained, fluted, burled, and scarred, with spurred branch scars and persistent dead limbs. Bark on mature trees cracked or fissured, not shedding readily; outer surface of scales greybrown, with prominent irregular lenticels with black craters; undersurface brown, dull, ± fibrous, with weathered grey margins. Roots of mature trees plate-like, shallow, far-spreading, often with low rounded buttresses; mycorrnizal nodules simple or branched, epidermal hairs common. Layered plants forming dense stem and root entanglements; stem and root grafting prevalent. Cotyledons c. 3.5 × 1.5 mm, ±fleshy, arched, amphistomatic. Primary axis of seedlings and juveniles strongly recurved, becoming erect behind leaders. Leaves ± monomorphic; on adult branchlets c. 2.0 × 1.0 mm, rhomboid, scalelike, strongly keeled and bead-like, closely imbricate; decurrent at base, spirally arranged; amphistomatic; Florin ring indistinct or absent; marginal frill uneven and discontinuous; older leaves persistent, brown, semi-woody. Leaves on seedlings as above, but slightly longer and less appressed. No specialised resting buds formed. Plants unisexual, with inconstant males and females. Male cones solitary, terminal on foliage branchlets, sessile, with up to 20 sporophylls, each with 2 sporangia; pollen with a thick-walled finely granular cappa; sacci 2, small, each with a proximal tubercle at base. Female cones solitary, terminal on foliage branchlets, pendulous by curvature of cone axis, consisting of 5—8(—10) spoon-shaped spreading keeled fertile bracts separated by distinct internodes; ovules borne in a median position on adaxial surface of fertile bract, initially obliquely inclined towards cone axis and partially inverted, becoming erect at maturity but topographically inverted; seeds 5-8(-10), inverted, spaced; c. 2.2 × 2.0 mm, shortly oblong to squarish, dorsiventrally compressed, apex notched with a central prominent micropyle; seed coat brown, papery, loose, wrinkled when dry, turgid when wet, enclosing the ovoid compressed seed body; epimatium brown, papery, dry, erose, forming a split asymmetrical sheath around base of seed. Seeds maturing in c. 1 year from cone induction and germinating the following summer, buoyant and dispersed mainly by water.