There were three American plant collectors busy on the same beach that day, Amos Arthur Heller and his wife, Emily Gertrude, sent by the New York Botanical Gardens, and Charles Frederick Millspaugh from the Field Museum of Natural History, and all collected samples of the species.

In the 1907 volume of the Symbolae Antillanae, Urban identified the Santurce beach specimens as a species new to science, which he described as S. arenaria, attributing the name to Nathaniel Lord Britton.

Dolichostylous flowers bear a glabrous corolla shaped ovate-cylindrical, which measures 7mm long including the lobes, and 3.5mm in diameter.

S. schreberi has often similar leaves, but differs in having numerous peduncles in the leaf axils, smaller flowers with pinkish or reddish lobes.

[7] It was originally collected along a beach near the town of Santurce, now a suburb of the capital city of Puerto Rico, San Juan.

[11] Hurricane Hugo hit Puerto Rico in 1989, so the assessment may have been written a considerable time before it was accepted into the Red List and rather outdated.

The population at Piñones is located at Punta Maldonado,[3] it was once larger, but numerous mature plants were destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

At El Convento, Fajardo, the species grows on small limestone hills on the property of the governor's beach house.

Only a single individual tree was found growing in the Río Abajo Forest in 1985, at a place called Cuesta de los Perros.

[7] It was originally collected amongst other shrubs atop the higher sand dunes along a beach in what is now a suburb of the capital city of Puerto Rico.

Millspaugh noted in 1900 that the flora of the sandy beaches around San Juan was unique in the Antilles, differing from the usual coastal species of the Caribbean.

[4] The habitat in which modern populations are mostly found is small limestone hills in coastal, evergreen and semi-evergreen, subtropical, moist thickets or forests.

[2] This tree was recommended for federal listing in the 1978 book Endangered and threatened plants of the United States, issued by the Smithsonian Institution and World Wildlife Fund.

[3] It was first assessed as 'indeterminate' by Walter and Gillett for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in 1997, but was declared to be 'endangered' by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre for the same organisation's website the following year.

The most up to date information about the state of the species is still by Marelisa Rivera at the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Federal Register of 1991, at this time there were some 200 trees growing in the wild, in five locations.

This company had indicated this land was to be donated to the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources for its protection, and that they supported federally listing the species.