The Monimiaceae is a family of flowering plants in the magnoliid order Laurales. It is closely related to the families Hernandiaceae and Lauraceae. It consists of shrubs, small trees, and a few lianas of the tropics and subtropics, mostly in the southern hemisphere. The largest center of diversity is New Guinea, with about 75 species. Lesser centres of diversity are Madagascar, Australia, and the neotropics. Africa has one species, Xymalos monospora, as does Southern Chile (Peumus boldus). Several species are distributed through Malesia and the southwest Pacific.
The Monimiaceae are underrepresented in herbaria and other plant collections.
The Monimiaceae include 24 genera with a total of about 217 known species. The largest genera and the number of their constituent species is: Tambourissa (50), Mollinedia (20-90), Kibara (43), Steganthera (17), Palmeria (14), and Hedycarya (11). The type genus, Monimia, is endemic to the Mascarenes.
The number of species in the Monimiaceae has been variously estimated from about 200 Most of this difference results from uncertainty over species limits in the tropical American genus Mollinedia. Estimates of the number of species in Mollinedia have ranged from 20 but many authors today regard this as an example of overdescription.
The wood of Peumus boldus and Hedycarya arborescens is used locally, in Chile and New Zealand, respectively, but is of no commercial importance. Both of these species are grown in their native regions as ornamentals.
Fossil wood attributed to the Monimiaceae has been found in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa and on James Ross Island, Antarctica. Both of these fossil sites are roughly 83 million years old, from the Campanian stage of the Cretaceous period. Fossil leaves of the Monimiaceae are known from the Paleocene of King George Island of the South Shetland Islands, near the Antarctic Peninsula
Divergence of different groups within Monimiaceae was long believed to be explained by the separation of East Gondwana (India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Australia, Antarctica, and New Caledonia) from West Gondwana (Africa and South America), and by the later separation of Africa and South America. The family Monimiaceae was long considered to be one of the best examples of vicariance, but the dating of clades by molecular clock methods has shown that the presence of the Monimiaceae in Africa and South America can be explained only by long-distance dispersal.
Genera
The information on genera is from Renner et al. (2010) He called it "[the] order Monimieae", but the orders of that time were equivalent to what are now called families. He defined the family broadly, to include what are now called the Siparunaceae and Atherospermataceae, as well as the modern Monimiaceae. This circumscription of the family prevailed until the 1990s, but some, such as Robert Brown and John Lindley, recognized the Atherospermataceae as a separate family.
Jussieu used the now-obsolete genus names Ruizia, Ambora, Citrosma, and Pavonia (sensu Ruiz & Pavón). These are now known as Peumus, Tambourissa, Siparuna, and Laurelia, respectively. Jussieu was apparently unaware that Antonio José Cavanilles had published the name Pavonia in 1786 for a genus in the Malvaceae. Later authors replaced the name Ruizia with Boldea, until it was eventually determined that Peumus is the correct name for this genus.
In 1855, Louis-René Tulasne wrote two landmark papers on the Monimiaceae. Using current names, the genera that he recognized were: Peumus, Monimia, Tambourissa, Hedycarya, Mollinedia, Kibara, Siparuna, Atherosperma, Laurelia, and Doryphora.
In 1898, Janet Russell Perkins began a series of articles on the Monimiaceae, but only two were ever completed. The second of these was mistitled as part III on its first page (compare to table of contents therein) and covers the genus Siparuna, which is now grouped with Glossocalyx in the family Siparunaceae.
The first in this series covers the tribe Mollinedieae, but begins with an extensive discussion of the family. Perkins defined the family very broadly, to include Amborella, Trimenia, and Piptocalyx. These are now regarded as basal angiosperms, and Piptocalyx is a segregate of Trimenia. Perkins also included the genus Conuleum, but it is now usually treated in Siparuna because it is monospecific and sister to Siparuna.
In this paper, Perkins named five new genera: Macropeplus, Macrotorus, Steganthera, Tetrasynandra, and Anthobembix. The genus Anthobembix consisted of two species that Perkins had transferred from Kibara. In 1942, these were transferred to Steganthera. The genus Lauterbachia was named by Perkins in a flora published in 1901.
A comprehensive treatment of the Monimiaceae was published by Perkins and Ernest Friedrich Gilg in Das Pflanzenreich in 1901.
The most recent monograph of the Monimiaceae was written by William Raymond Philipson in 1993 in a series entitled The Families and Genera of Vascular Plants. In these three subfamilies, Philipson recognized a total of 25 genera. He did not accept Anthobembix, but he did include the other 19 genera from the 1901 monograph by Perkins and Gilg. He also included six genera that had been published after Perkins and Gilg (1901): Decarydendron, Kibaropsis, Austromatthaea, Kairoa, Faika, and Parakibara. The latter three had been named by Philipson in the 1980s.
After Philipson's treatment of the Monimiaceae, the genera Hemmantia and "Endressia" were published in 2007 in Flora of Australia. Grazielanthus was published in 2008 in Kew Bulletin. The name "Endressia" (sensu Whiffin) is now known to be illegitimate because Jaques Étienne Gay had published the name Endressia for a genus in the Apiaceae in 1832. Endressia is related to Angelica and Selinum in the tribe Selineae.
Molecular phylogenetic studies of the angiosperms and of Laurales had only sparsely sampled the Monimiaceae until 2010. In that year, and in 2014, phylogenies were produced that were based on much denser sampling. These have shown that the next revision of the family must make substantial changes to the genera.
Classification
From the time that the family Monimiaceae was established by Jussieu in 1809, until it was monographed by Philipson in 1993, it was usually circumscribed to include three distinct groups in the Laurales, which are recognized in the APG III system as the separate families Siparunaceae, Atherospermataceae, and Monimiaceae sensu stricto. The inclusion of Amborella and Trimenia was always doubtful and was rejected by many. Their exclusion from the Monimiaceae was well established by the time Philipson wrote his treatise on the family.
Beginning with the ground-breaking paper by Mark W. Chase and many coauthors in 1993, the cladistic analysis of DNA sequences has contributed much to the knowledge of angiosperm phylogeny. By the end of the 1990s, it was evident that the traditional circumscription of Monimiaceae was paraphyletic over the monotypic family Gomortegaceae, and possibly polyphyletic, as well, because the major part of it formed a clade with the Hernandiaceae and Lauraceae.