
Dransfieldia is a monotypic genus of flowering plant in the palm family from western New Guinea where the lone species Dransfieldia micrantha grows in dense rain forest. Discovered in 1872, 134 years passed before DNA testing revealed its proper placement. With no close relatives, it is a delicate, pinnate-leaved palm named after John Dransfield, former palm expert at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.
SPECIES
General: Geography and distribution Dransfieldia micrantha grows
via GBIF · Kew POWO
Dransfieldia is a monotypic genus of flowering plant in the palm family from western New Guinea where the lone species Dransfieldia micrantha grows in dense rain forest. Discovered in 1872, 134 years passed before DNA testing revealed its proper placement. With no close relatives, it is a delicate, pinnate-leaved palm named after John Dransfield, former palm expert at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.
== Description == The thin trunk is solitary, gray to maroon in color, with distinct, widely spaced leaf scar rings. The leaf sheaths are extended, forming a distinct green crownshaft; the small rachis bears widely spaced, acute leaflets, slightly offset and taper to a point. The inflorescence is borne beneath the crownshaft, protected by a caducous prohyll, once-branched, producing one-seeded fruit with apical remains.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).