Pelecyphora missouriensis(Sweet) D.Aquino & Dan.Sánchez

Missouri foxtail cactus

WFO wfo-0001302760 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Pelecyphora missouriensis, photographed by Seth G. Breeding
fig. a Seth G. Breeding, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-03-16 / obs. 32948789

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
385874
Filed as
Mammillaria notesteinii Britton
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
F. N. Notestein 1891
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 15 botanical countries

Regions where Pelecyphora missouriensis is native: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Mexico Northeast, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wyoming ArizonaColoradoIllinoisKansasMexico NortheastMissouriMontanaNebraskaNew MexicoNorth DakotaOklahomaSouth DakotaTexasUtahWyoming
Native distribution of Pelecyphora missouriensis, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Arizona ARI NORTHERN AMERICA
Colorado COL
Illinois ILL
Kansas KAN
Mexico Northeast MXE
Missouri MSO
Montana MNT
Nebraska NEB
New Mexico NWM
North Dakota NDA
Oklahoma OKL
South Dakota SDA
Texas TEX
Utah UTA
Wyoming WYO

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 108 in flower of 271 examined

Proportion of examined Pelecyphora missouriensis in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 4 too few examined
Feb 0 9 0% 0% to 30%
Mar 2 72 3% 1% to 10%
Apr 47 87 54% 44% to 64%
May 45 68 66% 54% to 76%
Jun 14 15 93% 70% to 99%
Jul 0 1 too few examined
Aug 0 4 too few examined
Sep 0 4 too few examined
Oct 0 2 too few examined
Nov 0 4 too few examined
Dec 0 1 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Pelecyphora missouriensis observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 108 of 271 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 562 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -9.4 °C 0.3 °C 6.3 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 27.8 °C 32.5 °C 35.1 °C
Annual rainfall 322 mm 515 mm 1,013 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 32 mm 61 mm 187 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 562 research-grade observations of Pelecyphora missouriensis that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 51 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Cactus mammillaris Nutt.
  • Cactus missouriensis (Sweet) Kuntze
  • Cactus missouriensis var. robustior (Engelm.) J.M.Coult.
  • Cactus missouriensis var. similis (Engelm.) J.M.Coult.
  • Cactus notesteinii (Britton) Rydb.
  • Cactus similis (Engelm.) Small
  • Coryphantha asperispina Boed.
  • Coryphantha marstonii Clover
  • Coryphantha missouriensis (Sweet) Britton & Rose
  • Coryphantha missouriensis var. caespitosa (Engelm.) L.D.Benson
  • Coryphantha missouriensis var. marstonii (Clover) L.D.Benson
  • Coryphantha missouriensis var. robustior (Engelm.) L.D.Benson
  • Coryphantha nuttallii Engelm. ex C.F.Först.
  • Coryphantha similis (Engelm.) Britton & Rose
  • Coryphantha wissmannii (Hildm. ex K.Schum.) A.Berger
  • Echinocactus similis (Engelm.) Poselg.
  • Escobaria asperispina (Boed.) D.R.Hunt
  • Escobaria missouriensis (Sweet) D.R.Hunt
  • Escobaria missouriensis subsp. asperispina (Boed.) N.P.Taylor
  • Escobaria missouriensis subsp. missouriensis
  • Escobaria missouriensis subsp. navajoensis Hochstätter
  • Escobaria missouriensis var. asperispina (Boed.) N.P.Taylor
  • Escobaria missouriensis var. caespitosa (Engelm.) D.R.Hunt
  • Escobaria missouriensis var. marstonii (Clover) D.R.Hunt

and 27 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol ESMI3. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.