Velloziaceae – Pandas of the plant world summarizes my research on this fascinating plant family, exemplifying my decades of love, field and lab work, which was lurking in my field notebooks, photos and computers, slowly being chiseled into scientific articles. I fell in love with these beautiful plants on expeditions to several Brazilian mountains. I discovered that many of these plants live for thousands of years – several extant individuals were already flowering long before the discovery of South America, some even before Christ. This is documented and illustrated by over 100 photos and figures as well as by my field experiments in which I marked individuals and monitored their growth rates for several decades. You will find chapters dealing with their Geographic Distribution, Taxonomy, Vegetative and Reproductive Morphology, Clonality, Ecological Adaptations, Longevity, Pollination, Seeds, Herbivory, Function as Epiphyte Hosts (Phorophytes), Natural habitats and challenges to cultivation, Anatomy, Chemistry, Uses, Conservation, Intrinsic relation with Fire, Vegetation, and a large set of references.