Dominican discoveries

Abstract

Two recent expeditions to the Dominican Republic revealed numerous exciting novelties in palms. Our new international collaboration has set its goal to create a better understanding of Coccothrinax. The genus is in tribe Cryosophileae of subfamily Coryphoideae (Dransfield et al. 2008). Relatedness amongst the genera in Cryosophileae is not well known (Baker et al. 2009, Cano et al. 2018), and much remains to be discovered about the genera of the Cryosophileae. Despite this, it has been shown that Coccothrinax is strongly supported as closely related to Zombia (they are sister genera; Cano et al. 2018), a monotypic genus endemic to the island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) in the Caribbean.