plant with two cotyledons in its embryo. Dicotyledons constitute the larger of the two great divisions of flowering plants. and typically have broad. stalked leaves with netlike veins (contrast with monocotyledon).
| Dicotyledon | |
|---|---|
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| Lamium album (white dead nettle) | |
Scientific classification
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| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| Clade: | Spermatophytes |
| Clade: | Angiosperms |
| Groups included | |
| Cladistically included but traditionally excluded taxa | |
The dicotyledons, also known as dicots (or more rarely dicotyls), are one of the two groups into which all the flowering plants or angiosperms were formerly divided. The name refers to one of the typical characteristics of the group, namely that the seed has two embryonic leaves or cotyledons. There are around 200,000 species within this group. The other group of flowering plants were called monocotyledons or monocots, typically having one cotyledon. Historically, these two groups formed the two divisions of the flowering plants.
Largely from the 1990s onwards, molecular phylogenetic research confirmed what had already been suspected, namely that dicotyledons are not a group made up of all the descendants of a common ancestor (i.e. they are not a monophyletic group). Rather, a number of lineages, such as the magnoliids and groups now collectively known as the basal angiosperms, diverged earlier than the monocots did. The traditional dicots are thus a paraphyletic group. The eudicots are the largest clade