Moss has remarkable abilities to survive harsh environmental conditions, making it a key species in habitat restoration following disturbances such as fire, exploring these abilities informs efforts to improve stress tolerance in other plants and enhances our understanding of the evolution of stress tolerance. Here, we report a new record of thermal tolerance for the dried moss Syntrichia caninervis. Dry moss cuttings survived 60 min at 120 °C, exceeding the previous record of 30 min at 120 °C. We also investigated the morphology and gene expression profile of the shoots from dried S. caninervis shoots exposed to 80, 100, 110, and 120 °C for 10, 20, 30, or 60 min, using 20 °C as the control temperature. Shoots were allowed to regenerate on native sand under recovery conditions, after which we examined them daily for 56 days. Over this period, our observations indicated that lethal time-temperature combinations abolished shoot regeneration potential, whereas sub-lethal combinations lengthened the emergence time of protonema and new shoots, and led to decreased protonema emergence area. In addition, we determined that the transcript levels of nine genes (ScHSP70-3, ScHSP70-12, ScHSP70-15, ScELIP1, ScELIP2, ScABA1, ScABA3, ScNCED, and ScDREB) were induced upon temperature stress, as assessed following 120 °C 30 min of heat stress exposure. Few extant desert mosses encounter temperatures this high in nature, suggesting that the observed tolerance is unlikely to be the result of adaptation to current or recent climate conditions. We hope that the results of this study will help us understand the mechanisms by which organisms such as mosses survive thermal stress and how these mechanisms evolved.