| Eudicots (Tricolpates) Fossil range: Early Cretaceous - Recent |
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Eudicots and Eudicotyledons are terms introduced by Doyle & Hotton (1991) to refer to a group of flowering plants that had been called "tricolpates" or "non-Magnoliid dicots" by previous authors. The term means, literally, "true dicotyledons" as it contains the majority of plants that have been considered dicotyledons and have typical dicotyledonous characters. The term "eudicots" has been widely adopted to refer to one of the two major clades of angiosperms, monocots being the other. The remaining dicots are sometimes referred to as paleodicots but this term has not been widely adopted as it does not refer to a monophyletic group.
A large number of familiar plants are eudicots. A few are forget-me-not, cabbage, apple, dandelion, buttercup, maple and macadamia.
Another name for the eudicots is tricolpates, a name which refers to the structure of the pollen. The group has tricolpate pollen, or forms derived from it. These pollen have three or more pores set in furrows called colpi. In contrast, most of the other seed plants (that is the gymnosperms, the monocots and the paleodicots) produce monosulcate pollen, with a single pore set in a differently oriented groove called the sulcus. The name "tricolpates" is preferred by some botanists in order to avoid confusion with the dicots, a non-monophyletic group (Judd & Olmstead 2004).
The name eudicots (plural) is used in the APG system, of 1998, and APG II system, of 2003, for classification of angiosperms. It is applied to a clade, a monophyletic group, which includes most of the (former) dicotyledons.
Within the "eudicots" or "tricolpates" the main groups are the "rosids" (core group with the prefix "eu−") and the "asterids" (core group with the prefix "eu−").
In more detail, within each clade some unplaced families and orders (unplaced genera are not mentioned):
Note : “ + ....” = optional, as a segregate of the previous family.