Coconut Palms, Cocos nucifera, grow naturally along the Yucatan peninsula's beaches. Many palm species other than Coconut Palms are planted in the Yucatan and several are native. You can distinguish the Coconut Palm from the others by these features:
Palms are "monoecious," which means that their flowers are unisexual, but flowers of both sexes occur on the same tree. In the picture at the right of a Coconut Palm's flower cluster, or inflorescence, notice the many small, greenish items densely arranged along the slender, fingerlike things directed toward the picture's upper, right corner. Those are male flowers, or what's left of them. The much less numerous and larger, oval items in the picture's lower, left corner are female flowers, or the female flowers' pistils enlarging as they become coconuts. Notice how the entire large inflorescence arises from a semi-woody, brownish, scooplike spathe. The spathe surrounds and protects the flowers as they develop. Spathes remain on the tree until well after the fruits are mature.
In some parts of the Yucatan Lethal Yellowing Disease has killed most or almost all of the Coconut Palms. One reason for the disease's devastation is that earlier the Yucatan's diverse natural Coconut Palm population, which included trees bearing nuts of many sizes and shapes, were replaced by just one Coconut race -- one with big, spherical nuts -- which sold better. The disease then rampaged through the resulting monoculture. Now everyone is encouraged to plant native types, even if their nuts are not especially big and spherical. You can see some native longish coconuts below:
