Magnoliidae (Noun)
Meaning
A group of families of trees and shrubs and herbs having well-developed perianths and apocarpous ovaries and generally regarded as the most primitive extant flowering plants; contains 36 families including Magnoliaceae and Ranunculaceae; sometimes classified as a superorder.
Classification
Nouns denoting plants.
Examples
- Magnoliidae include flowering plants as ancient as, and probably even older than, conifers.
- Morphology has remained surprisingly stable across a hundred million years or so for all but two small subclasses in Magnoliidae, yielding perhaps half-a-dozen morphologically distinct clades.
- Many modern phylogenetic studies have shown that the traditional angiosperm subclass Magnoliidae is polyphyletic, as presently defined.
- A phylogenetic study places the major subgroup with clade core Ranunculidae and eudicots as embedded in Magnoliidae.
- In the strictest sense, the term Magnoliidae is a synonym for the old paraphyletic subclass Magnoliidae or Dicotylae, described as all angioperms but comelinids, with those restricted to commelinids themselves.