Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Medium-sized palms 6–12 m or more tall.

Stems: Trunk slender, ca. 10 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Spirally arranged, the crown typically contains fifteen to twenty ascending, spreading, and sometimes drooping leaves. Lower surfaces densely covered with a rather soft, yellowish gray or nearly golden tomentum composed of not very appressed, yet much fringed scales. Veins parallel. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences of only 1 or more large panicles borne on an apparently short, peduncular part; rachillae villous, panicle rachis and all inflorescence rachises clothed with a soft, rufous wool, which is partly deciduous with age; prophyll and peduncular bracts usually lepidote, tubular in the lower portion and expanded above into a very long-acuminate, rigid-chartaceous blade, copiously covered with a soft, rufous wool. Flowers bisexual (perfect), sessile. Calyx cupular, shallowly 3-lobed, prominently nerved or smooth when dry. Corolla of 3 petals, adnate basally to the staminal filament tube to about the height of the calyx, the distinct lobes valvate in bud, caducous as the flower expands, prominently pocketed and furrowed within, prominently nerved when dry. Stamens 6; filaments flattened, thickish, connate basally into a tube equaling or exceeding the calyx and surrounding the carpels, then distinct and abruptly subulate, not inflexed at apex; anthers erect in bud, dorsifixed, spreading–erect to versatile at anthesis, oblong in outline, bifid basally nearly to the point of insertion, apex emarginate, the connective narrow; anther sacs longitudinally and laterally dehiscent. Ovary superior; carpels 3, normally only 1 maturing, coherent only basally; ovules 1 per carpel, with the broad–based styles connate above into a trigonous column tapering to a shallowly trifid stigma; ovules anatropous, erect, attached at the base of the placenta.

Fruit: Fruit ovoid–ellipsoid or obovoid; 10–20 mm long; 12–13 mm wide. Seeds distinct from endocarp except at the hilum; shiny; endosperm homogeneous except for a shallow invagination of the seed coat below the raphe; embryo lateral near the base opposite the raphe.

Ploidy:

Habitat: Occurring in mesic to wet forest.

Elevation Range: 760–1,220 m.