Trees other than palo lagarto which look like crocodile hide
I am embarked on two related searches in Maya ethnobotanical research:
- To find and photograph all trees (other than Ceiba pentandra) which have conical spines which remind you of the conical spines on incensarios of the Preclassic Izapa and Classic Maya.
- Trees whose bark reminds you of the rough and usually spiny profiles of a crocodile or caiman reptile, which is commemorated in Preclassic Izapa and Classic Maya art as a crocodile tree.
In other words, I am searching for the timeless palo de lagarto, an image that is best known from the stelae of Preclassic Izapa, but which is also known from Early Classic and Late Classic paintings on Maya art, especially of the Peten area. I show examples from Maya art in my PhD dissertation but in those years (1970’s basic research; 1980’s finishing the writing) I was not out in the forests looking for the actual trees. However for the last several years I have been studying all trees in Guatemala which have conical spines and/or rough crocodile-like bark.
At least one of the Izapa crocodile trees is easy to identify as a morro or jicaro, most probably Crescentia cujete. The leaves and fruits are pretty much the same as on the morro or jicaro trees in the San Bartolo (Peten) murals.
I doubt if anyone writing on the Izapa stelae back in the 1960’s through 1990’s was an ethnobotanist, so probably 98% of the identifications of the Izapa crocodile trees with jicara-like fruit are totally incorrect. However Karl Taube did identify the trees in the San Bartolo murals correctly as calabash trees (gourd trees).
Jicara, jicaro, morro are used interchangeably depending on what departmento you are in and what Crescentia tree is in front of you. But the Preclassic Izapa stela and the San Bartolo murals consistently show only one single species of Crescentia: the one whose leaves are parallel, Crescentia cujete. The other Crescentia species,Crescentia alata, has leaves in a pattern of three. So far that other Crescentia is not pictured in Maya scenes (or at least not that I have yet recognized).
The curious contradiction is that these actual Crescentia trees do not have either spines nor a bark which would remind me of either a caiman or crocodile tree. Yet there are many other trees in Guatemala whose rough and spiny bark does look like a crocodile’s profile. Although we are all aware that the insemination tree of the myth of the Popol Vuh is clearly a morro or jicaro (and absolutely not a cacao tree), other than the presence of a Crescentia tree in the Popol Vuh, I do not understand whatsoever why a crocodile tree is pictured with such obvious Crescentia tree leaves and tree gourd fruit.
The other Izapa stelae show crocodile trees which are not any Crescentia. The same is true with the crocodile trees in later Peten Maya art: most are definitely not Crescentia or even related. The Early Classic and Late Classic crocodile trees are precisely that: a crocodile whose body is reared up to create a tree. Only one shows a fruit from the trunk (as a side comment, we have found many trees that fruit from the trunk; far more than Theobroma cacao or Crescentia cujete
I translate palo de lagarto as crocodile tree rather than alligator tree since there are two species of crocodile native to the Maya area, and only one caiman (which is an alligator but named “crocodilus,” Caiman crocodilus, Spectacled Caiman. Every time I see a botanist translate palo de lagarto as alligator tree, this suggests they are frozen in time with alligators from Florida and crocodiles being primarily in Africa. This is a polite way of saying that most botanists are understandably not familiar with Maya ethnozoology.
Crocodile trees really do exist in Guatemala and Mexico
The crocodile trees of the Izapa stelae really do exist in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and probably Honduras and El Salvador. They are commonly known as palo de lagarto.
If you wander around Guatemala looking at trees, and you stop in local villages and ask for palo de lagarto you will get the same confused diversity of answers as if you Google palo de lagarto:
- Ceiba aesculifolia
- Various Zanthoxylum species
- Zanthoxylum acuminatum (http://lucina.inbio.ac.cr/portalDarwin/species/browse/taxon/75034)
And
- Acacia glomerosa, though I do not usually study this genera yet since most are bushes. The Maya tend to look to substantial trees as their models for the crocodile tree.
In South America or Central America outside the Maya area of Mesoamerica, of course you can get even more names for palo de lagarto, such as Cinchona pubescens Darwin-PILA Project, Costa Rica. And also Domestication de plantas medicinales en Centroamerica. But unless a tree has conspicious conical spines and/or rough bark that looks like a crocodile, I do not tend to include it in my iconographic comparisons.
I would like to add three more genera to the crocodile tree list: namely Erythrina, Hura and Spondias
Ceiba and Zanthoxylum obviously have spines. The Ceiba aesculifolia has even more spines than Ceiba pentandra. And Ceiba aesculifolia keeps the spines even as the tree matures. Ceiba pentandra trees tend to lose the spines on their massive trunks as they grow older (though may keep spines on many or most of their branches).
And, to look even more crocodile-like Ceiba aesculifolia is dark rather than the green color of a Ceiba pentandra. So Ceiba aesculifolia is a fairly logical candidate for a crocodile tree.
Pito trees also should be added to the potential candidates of a crocodile tree inspiration, most notably Erythrina fusca. Most pito trees have thorns, not conical spines, but some have conical spines.
I would also add Hura polyandra to the list. Hura polyandra, "habillo," is a remarkable tree, and thus it is rather amazing that Hura polandra has never been in the “need to find list” of any other Mayanist ethnobotanical “want list.”
- Hura polyandra is a huge tree
- Flower is beautiful (reminds me of an octopus)
- Tree trunk is literally covered with conical spines
- Seed pod explodes when ripe, with a loud noise
The Hura polyandra is reportedly a gigantic tree. Plus its seed pods are infamous for exploding with a loud sound. The explosion sends the seeds further than if they merely dropped to the ground. It would be ironic if one original model for the crocodile tree, at least of the Early Classic Maya, was Hura polyandra.
Also look at Hura crepitans (though mostly from Costa Rica south, so probably not in the Maya area of Mesoamerica)
But the term palo de lagarto is even more commonly applied to trees of the Zanthoxylum genus. They are also locally known as pochote (as is typical of the hopelessly inaccurate Spanish language for plants and animals, pochote can also refer to some Ceiba). For every tree, they are known as different words depending on the socio-economic class of the speaker, how much they know about local trees, and in which part of Guatemala they are located.
Most pochote trees have spines with are a bit flat (so more triangular than conical) but some Zanthoxylum species do indeed have conical spines. So here to, I can understand why they get the name palo de lagarto.
But I would like to add a third genera to the comparative list of possible models for a crocodile tree concept, namely Spondias. This is because at least two of the Spondias trees have rough bark which includes conical spines. The difference is that Ceiba trees have smooth bark so the conical spines really stand out.
During mid-January we visited the property of Efrain…. adjacent to the Rio de los Esclavos. He had a tree with noticeable spines and rough bark. He said it was jocote jobo. Sofia Monzon looked this up via Google and found it was Spondias mombin which like any other tree in the Maya area has different names depending on where you are and who you ask: a few are: hog plum, jobo, Jocote amarillo. And evidently in some areas it is called jocote jobo (according to our informant).
On his same property I saw another tree, also being used as a fence post, that also had spines. Possibly this was another jocote jobo, though I am not sure. Many trees in Guatemala lose most of their leaves as the dry season approaches.
Since neither of these trees was flowering or bearing fruit, we could only list the names which we found in the Internet and in Trees of Guatemala for “jocote jobo.”
On the Internet almost every article is about the chemicals that are in the fruit or leaves or other parts of the Mombin plant. There is almost no information available on the spines or rough bark (certainly nothing oriented to the student of Maya iconography).
Spondias mombin, hog plum, jobo, Jocote amarillo…”thick, fissured bark, often, in young trees, bearing many blunt-pointed spines or knobs up to 3/4 in (2 cm) long…” (www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/yellow_mombin_ars.html).
Young leaves are cooked as greens (ibid). Gum is used as a glue. Bark used for tanning. This web site gets its information directly from Morton, J. 1987, Yellow Mombin. p. 245–248. In: Fruits of Warm Climates.
FRANCIS, John K.
- 1992 Spondias mombin L. Hogplum. SO-ITF-SM-51. New Orleans, LA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Forest Experiment Station. 4 pages. Available on-line in Spanish, www.fs.fed.us/global/iitf/Spondiasmombin.pdf
JUSTINIANO, M. Joaquin, FREDERICKSEN, Todd S., Daniel NASH G.
- 2001 Ecología y Silvicultura de Especies Menos Conocidas – Azucaró Spondias mombin L., Anacardiaceae. Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Proyecto de Manejo Forestal Sostenible (BOLFOR). Santa Cruz, Bolivia. 38 pages.
Observations on other species of Spondias
Spondias purpurea, Purple Mombin.
Jocote de jobo: Spondias purpurea, Morton, J. 1987. p. 242–245. In: Fruits of Warm Climates. Lac insects (cochinilla) are raised on this tree in Mexico (Morton) and also in Rabinal (personal observation, 2011). Stated to be “frequently used as a living fence, “though I tend to see palo jiote or madre de cacao as a living fence throughout Guatemala.
Spondias radlkoferi, Jocote tronador
Bark has segmented areas, linear yet slightly irregular, which look a bit like the underside of a crocodile or caiman. However there are no spines (at least none on the images shown on Google). However the compendium of botanical sources by Tracey Parker, Trees of Guatemala, states sometimes with spiny projections, smoother than the bark of Spondias mombin. However Parker does not list any spines for Spondias mombin. Parque Ecologico Nueva Juventud. San Andres, Guatemala
Flowers are very attractive: star-shapped.
In conclusion: status of the search for the original of the Crocodile Tree
The inspiration for the crocodile tree to my eyes is a combination of conical spines but also rough bark (jocote and other species are good here) but the Maya seem to have looked more at conical spines (irrespective of the fact that most trees with noticeable conical spines have smooth bark, so not at all the rough pattern of a crocodile hide.
So clearly we need to look more carefully at real crocodiles and the one caiman and see which are the crucial aspects:
- Conical spines but on smooth area (Ceiba, Hura)
- Rough areas with rectangular patterns (Jocote and several other trees).
Hura and two Ceiba species are the most obvious models for conical spines, but at least one Erythrina and at least one Zanthoxylum also have conical spines. And even if jocote trees are not the immediate origin of the Crocodile Tree, in any deep discussion of Crocodile Trees we should not forget the two or three possible species of Spondias.
Miscellaneous observation:
Interesting that jocote are in same family, Anacardiaceae, as is the mango (not native to Mesoamerica) which is same family as the cashew (which is very much native to Mesoamerica).
First posted mid-January 2012.
