Michelsonia is a genus of tree in the legume family, Fabaceae, where it is classified in the subfamily Detarioideae. It is a monotypic genus, the only species being Michelsonia microphylla. It is native to the tropical rain forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The wood is used locally for construction work.
Michelsonia is a genus of tree in the legume family, Fabaceae, where it is classified in the subfamily Detarioideae. It is a monotypic genus, the only species being Michelsonia microphylla. It is native to the tropical rain forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The wood is used locally for construction work.
==Description== Michelsonia microphylla is a medium to large tree with a spreading crown, growing to a height of or more. The trunk is cylindrical and bare of branches for the first . It can grow to a diameter of about , the base flaring out a little and sometimes having small buttresses. The pinnate leaves are alternate and have ten to sixteen pairs of leaflets. The compound inflorescences are at the tips of the shoots and the individual flowers have white petals about long, and are followed by flat, glossy brown, woody pods up to long. These are so heavy that they sink in water. This tree is similar in appearance to Tetraberlinia baregarum, with which it can be confused.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).