Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Unbranched trees up to 15 m tall.

Stems: Trunk smooth, grayish 20–25 cm in diameter.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Spirally arranged, the hemispherical crown typically contains up to twenty ascending to spreading leaves. Blades 122 cm long and 122–152 cm wide slightly wavy to nearly flat and deeply divided nearly to one-half into as many as seventy stiff-tipped segments. Surfaces glossy green above and below. Veins parallel. Petioles 91 cm long, sparsely or moderately covered along the edges at the base with fibers. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in spreading to drooping inflorescences with up to two moderately long primary branches that about equal the leaf stalks in length but expand slightly so that the fruit stalks are longer than the leaf stalks but shorter than the leaf blades. Flower and fruit branchlets are moderately thick, up to 12.7 cm long, and densely clothed with short, velvety, brownish hairs. 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.

Fruit: Fruit large; shiny dark brown to black; ovoid to ellipsoid fruits nearly 5 cm long and 4.5 cm wide when mature. When heavily laden; the fruit stalks hang down below the leaves; often resting against the skirt of old; persistent dead leaves. 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: Wet Forest

Elevation Range: 900 m.