Ariocarpus scaphirostris

Ariocarpus scaphirostris is a cactus in the family Cactaceae, native to Mexico. It grows geophytically, with a dark green to brown body four to nine centimetres across, of which only the warts show above the soil. The warts are roughly triangular in cross-section, spreading and pointed, and more than twice as long as they are wide; areoles are absent or sit near the tip of the wart. The plant is slow growing and flowers only rarely, producing magenta flowers up to four centimetres across, followed by greenish fruits nine to fifteen millimetres long. It is endemic to hot deserts on shaly limestone in a single valley in Nuevo León, at elevations of 950 to 1,400 metres. Friedrich Bödeker first described it in 1930 under the spelling scapharostrus, and D. R. Hunt corrected the epithet to scaphirostris in 1991 to comply with the botanical code. The name comes from the Greek skaphe, a ship, and the Latin rostrum, a beak, and refers to the shape of the wart tips. Chemical analysis has found the alkaloids hordenine and N-methyltyramine, among others, in the plant.