Name honors Count Luigi Ferdinanda Marsigli ( I656-1730), Italian botanist at Bologna.
Plants small, terrestrial, of transient pools or moist to flooded places. Rhizomes slender, short-to long-creeping. Fronds clustered, narrow. Stipes round, green. Blades 4-leaf-clover-like, with 4 closely attached pinnae at tips of stipes, or with 2 pinnae, or pinnae lacking. Sporocarps elliptic, firm, hairy (glabrous with age), single or multiple with firm, thick walls, peduncles simple or sometimes branched, inserted on bases of petioles or on rhizomes near petiole bases, each sporocarp containing a sorophore bearing multiple sori containing megaspores or microspores.
A widespread family of three genera. Represented in Hawai 'i by the single genus Marsilea.
