Annual or perennial herbs with alternate, entire or coarsely toothed leaves. Capitula sessile or shortly peduncled, heterogamous, discoid, solitary or in monochasial cymes, occasionally in racemiform synflorescence. Receptacle flat or convex, epaleate. Involucre hemispherical. Phyllaries uni– or biseriate, ± equal, membranous–margined. Ray florets female, multiseriate fertile, ligules indistinctly 3–lobed, creamy yellow or purplish. Disc florets bisexual. Corolla campanulate, 4–lobed, glabrous. Anther bases obtuse, entire, rarely shortly tailed Style branches truncate, apically papillose. Cypselas of ray and disc florets almost similar, hardly flattened, obtusely 3–4 ribbed or angled, glandular hairs usualy present between ribs. Pappus absent.

A small genus, comprising of 10 species, mainly distributed in Australia and New Zealand, one species Centipeda minima (L.) Braun & Anderson is widely distributed in Asia, Papua, New Guienea and South America. Represented in Pakistan by C. minima which has  been collected only once from our area.

The taxonomic treatment of the genus Centipeda has always been controversial. It has been variously placed in different tribes by different workers. Bremer & Humpharies (Bull. Nat. Hist. Mus. London, Bot. 23: 161. 1993) put it in the tribe Astereae, whereas Walsh (Muelleria 15 : 33. 2001) while revising the genus suggested that it might belonged to tribe Astereae or tribe Gnaphalieae. Nesom (Phytologia 76 : 193 – 274. 1994) also considered it as a member of Astereae whereas Bremer, l. c. 271. 1994 and Shih & Gibert, l. c. 2011, put it in an unassigned tribe. Panero (Phytologia 87 : 1–14. 2005) placed it under his own monotypic subtribe Centipedinae Panero of the tribe Athroismeae on the basis of molecular evidence. In the present treatment we have followed Panero, l. c.