Tree, to 25 m tall and to 50 cm dbh; outer bark with shallow vertical furrows separating flat-surfaced ridges; wood hard, heavy; branchlets subtetragonal, stellate-pubescent when young, glabrate in age; glands and pseudostipules lacking. Leaves palmately 5-foliolate, deciduous; petioles 6-18 cm long, stellate-pubescent; petiolules 0.2-5.1 cm long; leaflets mostly oblong-obovate, abruptly acuminate, obtuse to truncate (rarely subcordate) at base, membranaceous, lepidote on both surfaces, the pubescence stellate, sparse above and dense below, the margins entire to serrate, the terminal leaflet largest, 5-22 cm long, 1.8-4.4 cm wide. Inflorescences contracted terminal panicles, branches stellate-pubescent; flowers precocious; calyx campanulate, 5-lobed, 8-15 mm long, woolly-pubescent with shorter stellate and longer (to 7 mm) simple trichomes; corolla yellow, tinged reddish in throat, 4-8.3 cm long, nearly glabrous outside, villous inside, glandular-pubescent at level of stamen insertion, the tube brownish (at least in dried specimens), 3-5.8 cm long; stamens didynamous, the longer ones 1.5-2 cm long, the shorter ones to 1.5 cm long, the thecae divaricate, 1.5-2.5 mm long; staminodium 2-11 mm long; pistil 2-2.7 cm long; ovary linear, to 5 mm long, lepidote to puberulent with simple and stellate trichomes. Capsules cylindrical, terete, tapered at both ends, 13-25 cm long, 1-1.5 cm wide, with golden woolly pubescence of short stellate trichomes and longer, +/- simple trichomes; seeds 4-8 mm long, 1.8-2.9 cm wide, the wings hyaline-membranaceous, distinctly demarcated from body of seed. Croat 6915. Known only as a seedling on BCI, but easily occurring as an adult as well. Elsewhere in Panama flowers from January to April with apparently two brief bursts of flowering. The fruits are mature in the middle to late dry season (Gentry, 1972). Superficially the species looks much like T. guayacan. BCI would be about the limit of the species' range toward the wetter Atlantic slope.