CYRTOSPERMA BECCARIANUM
PROTOLOGUE:
Cyrtosperma beccarianum A.Hay, published in Blumea 33: 455 (1988), with Fig. 13.
Type: Beccari P.P. s.n., West Papua, Batanta, July 1875 (holotype FI), the specimen Engler had cited in 1879 under C. macrotum. Hay's diagnosis: differs from C. macrotum in the erect posterior lobes of the leaf and the more or less flat, ovate spathe.²
SYNONYMS:
HOMOTYPIC SYNONYMS: N/A
HETEROTYPIC SYNONYMS: N/A. Cyrtosperma macrotum Becc. ex Engl. (1879) pro parte, as to the Batanta specimen.²
ACCEPTED INFRASPECIFICS: N/A
DISTRIBUTION:
New Guinea: New Guinea.¹
DISTRIBUTION NOTE: South-west and west New Guinea: Batanta and Ramoi in the Bird's Head region, the Lorentz and Digul Rivers and the Merauke area in southern Papua, and the Fly and Palmer Rivers, Kiunga and Lake Murray in Western Province, Papua New Guinea.² Records from 24 to 210 m.⁴
SPECIES DESCRIPTION:
Feeble to moderately robust herb 40–150 cm tall. Leaves 3–7; sheath papery, fibrous, about a quarter the length of the petiole; petiole sparsely armed to unarmed, rarely rather densely spiny; blade variable, held with the anterior lobe down and the posterior lobes up, usually sagittate; anterior lobe triangular, c. 10 cm long and 8 cm wide at the base; posterior lobes lanceolate, c. 25 cm long and 7.5 cm wide at the midpoint, their midribs naked in the angle of the sinus for up to 4 cm, the sinus 30–100 degrees.²
INFLORESCENCE:
Peduncle subequalling to exceeding the petioles, mostly with sparser armature, like the petioles variously blotched and marbled green, brown, pink and white, or plain brown or green, often drying grayish. Spathe broadly to narrowly ovate, opening broadly boat-shaped to flat, white, pale pink or pale yellow, the tip acuminate, from 1.8 by 5 cm to 4.8 by 9 cm; spadix sessile, adnate to the spathe for c. 5 mm, 4 by 20 mm in flower and 1.5 by 6 cm in fruit, pale yellow. Flowers tetramerous; ovule solitary. Fruit orange, globose, protruding from the spadix as it swells. Seeds tightly curved, smooth.²
ECOLOGY:
Low altitude, in streams and ditches and in the undergrowth of swamp forest and gallery forest, in shade; ecology and leaf form combine to make most individuals rheophytes.² 24–210 m.⁴
DISTRIBUTION MAPS:
Hay 1988 Fig. 14.
ETYMOLOGY:
For Odoardo Beccari (1843–1920), the Florentine botanist and explorer of New Guinea who collected the type in 1875.
NOTES:
1. A member of the Macrotum group, distinguished from C. macrotum by the leaf held with the posterior lobes up and the anterior lobe down and by the broad, flat spathe.² Hariri et al. (2024) list it with C. macrotum, C. hayii and C. prasinispathum.⁵
2. The type story: Engler's protologue of C. macrotum cited "Batanta, Beccari" and "Fly River, D'Albertis". Hay found that Beccari 619, the plant actually described and figured in fruit, came from Andai, not Batanta; that the Batanta plant of July 1875 was a different species, which became the type of this one; and that the D'Albertis gathering is a leaf of C. macrotum with an inflorescence of Lasia spinosa.²
3. Small, tetramerous and pale-spathed, it is the species most likely to be confused with C. prasinispathum, whose authors compared their plant only with C. macrotum.⁵
4. ⚠ No photograph of a living plant was found in the sources pulled; the genus-level iNaturalist observations from Indonesian Papua may include it.³
STORY:
STORY TITLE: Described in 1882, still never photographed
Odoardo Beccari's plant was published in Malesia in 1882, with a plate showing flower, fruit and seed. It has sat in the Macrotum group ever since, quietly, on herbarium material.
In 2024 Hariri and colleagues described Cyrtosperma prasinispathum: small, tetramerous, pale-spathed. So is beccarianum. But their comparison ran against Cyrtosperma macrotum, not against this one, which means the two most similar species in the group have still never been set side by side.
No photograph of a living Cyrtosperma beccarianum has been traced anywhere. A hundred and forty-four years after it was named, the plate Beccari commissioned remains the best picture of it.
REFERENCES:
1. Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Cyrtosperma beccarianum.
2. Hay, A. 1988. Cyrtosperma (Araceae) and its Old World allies. Blumea 33: 427–469 — protologue, p. 455.
3. iNaturalist: Cyrtosperma beccarianum
4. GBIF occurrence download for Cyrtosperma, 2026-09-05 (31 records)