Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Large palms 30(–40) m tall.

Stems: Trunk gray, longitudinally grooved, 30 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Spirally arranged. Lower surfaces glossy green, with scattered, small, pale brown, elliptic to circular scales. Veins parallel. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences with 2–4 axes from the base, each terminating in a panicle, 120–175 cm long, 3.5–4 cm wide at base, panicles 24–32 cm long, the branches 12–17 cm long, simple in the upper part, the lower part branching into 3–5 branchlets; bracts long-lanceolate, lower bracts up to 60 cm long, covered with rather long, pale brown tomentum. 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 brown to black with brown spots when mature; globose to obovoid and pyriform; 3–5 cm long; 3–4 cm 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 partially cleared; disturbed mesic forest.

Elevation Range: 600–800 m.