Abstract
Myristicaceae Brown (1810: 399), the pantropical ‘nutmeg family’, comprise 21 genera and 520 species (Christenhusz & Byng 2016). The family thrives in the dense evergreen forests of the Western Ghats and is represented by three genera, viz. Gymnacranthera (Candolle 1855: 31) Warburg (1896: 94), Knema Loureiro (1790: 604) and Myristica Gronovius (1755: 141) (Nayar et al. 2014). Knema, one of the major genera of Myristicaceae with 93 species, is distributed in Indomalaya (Mabberley 2018). In India, the genus is represented by eight species, of which the endemic Knema attenuata (Wallich in Hooker & Thomson, 1855: 157) Warburg (1896: 590) is the only species in the Western Ghats (Sinclair 1961, Nayar et al. 2014, Banik & Bora 2016).