Palm trees are often associated with Hollywood Boulevard and tropical resorts, but their relatives in the palm family Arecaceae can come in many different shapes and sizes. And one shuns the limelight to an almost absurd degree — the new-to-science Pinanga subterranea palm grows its flowers and fruit entirely underground.
“We knew immediately that it’s a really odd palm,” says Benedikt Kuhnhäuser, a botanist at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Richmond, England.
Malaysian botanist Paul Chai first noticed the palm growing in Lanjak Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary, on the island of Borneo, in the late 1990s. However, Kuhnhäuser says, Chai lost all his photographic evidence for the enigmatic plant during flooding in Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak. In 2018, Chai told Kuhnhäuser and other botanists visiting Borneo about the lost palm over breakfast. The team embarked on a multiday trek to reach the sanctuary and found, to their surprise, that the underground palm was actually abundant.
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