Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Small palms 3–10(–16) m tall.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. The crown typically contains twenty to thirty five ascending, spreading, and sometimes drooping leaves. Lower surfaces silvery gray, appressed yellowish or slightly yellowish brown lepidote when dry. Veins parallel. Petiolate. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in inflorescences equaling or longer than petioles and of 1–3 panicles on each peduncle, panicles ca. 20 cm long, rather loosely branched, twice in their lower part, simply above; rachillae sparsely to densely villous before exposure and either fugacious to various degrees or persistent in fruit (color of the scales varies from rusty to tan or silvery), strongly sinuous between the spirally alternate flowers; prophyll and peduncular bracts rigid, chartaceous, nearly glabrous, only palely lepidote to glabrate. 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 ellipsoid; narrowed toward both ends; but especially above; and pointed; ca. 4–5 cm long and 2.8–3.9 (–4.5) 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: Scattered in wet forest on slopes; ridges; precipices; and cliffs; sometimes in mesic valleys.

Elevation Range: 360–610 m.