Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Rather robust palms ca. 5 m tall.

Stems: Trunk 30–50 cm in diameter.

Roots: Fibrous root system.

Leaves: Leaves simple. The spherical crown typically contains up to twenty ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. Blades 91–121 cm long and 121–152 cm wide, slightly wavy to nearly flat blades. Surfaces green with numerous scattered scales to glabrate, upper surface glossy green, lower surface not waxy or glaucous. Margins divided nearly to one–half into as many as seventy stiff–tipped segments. Veins parallel. Petioles up to 91 cm long, the edges at the base with a moderate amount of fibers. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences shorter than the petioles and ca. 40 cm long, of 1–2 panicles composed of a small panicle borne on a rather short, outwardly curved, peduncular part, panicles ovate, thyrsoid, 10–12 cm long, slightly shorter than the bracts, dense, composed of a few 2–3–partite branches in its lower part and of simple floriferous branchlets elsewhere, the latter being relatively thick, ca. 4–5 mm in diameter, villous-lepidote, permanently clothed with a dense tomentum of rather long, ruffled, pale-colored hairs, somewhat angular and sinuous and marked with rather conspicuous, irregularly spirally alternate flowers, bracteoles inconspicuous, being hidden by the hairs; prophyll and peduncular bracts covered with the same kind of tomentum as petioles (more or less deciduous), tubular in the basal part and expanded above into a lanceolate to boat–shaped, acuminate, rigid, chartaceous blade, which completely envelopes the panicle. 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 shiny black; ellipsoid to nearly spherical fruits to 5.6 cm long and 4.1 cm wide when mature. 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: Widely distributed in dense wet forest or flat; boggy plateau.

Elevation Range: 1,000–2,000 m.