Simmonds adds the following additions to the description of the species :  "female flowers, the styles green with white stigmas, staminodes green, ovules biseriate and about 180 per ovary ; fruit, the skin darkening somewhat from very pale green towards maturity, not yellow at ripeness, the flesh dead white ; seeds as M. violascens, variably neatly cylindrical-truncate or ovoid-cylindrical and variable also as to size of the osteole to the perisperm chamber opposite the hilum ; male bud short lived dying off before fruit maturity, about 3 times as long as broad, strongly imbricate for nearly half its length and broadest about the middle ; bracts fully deciduous borne on rachis insertions which are much narrower and more widely spaced than in M. violascens ; male flowers, the anthers fawny, bearing chalky white pollen.

The best key characters to distinguish this species from M. violascens are the small size of the plant, the few large uniseriate fruits and the slender deeply imbricate male bud broadest about the middle with narrower bract insertions.  The deciduousness of the bracts mentioned by Holttum is hardly diagnostic, because M. violascens occasionally has this character".