Taxaceae

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Taxaceae

The family Taxaceae, commonly called the yew family, includes three genera and about 7 to 12 species of coniferous plant

Plant

Plants are Life organisms belonging to the Kingdom Plantae. They include familiar organisms such as trees, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae....
s, or in other interpretations (see Classification, below), six genera and about 30 species.

They are many-branched, small tree

TREE

TREE was a Boston hardcore punk band formed in the summer of 1990. They were active in the Boston music scene until disbanding in 2002....
s and shrub

Shrub

A shrub or bush is a horticulture rather than strictly Botany category of woody plant, distinguished from a tree by its multiple stems and lower height, usually less than 5-6 m tall....
s. The leaves are evergreen

Evergreen

In botany, an evergreen plant is a plant having leaf all year round. This contrasts with deciduous plants, which completely lose their foliage for part of the year....
, spirally arranged, often twisted at the base to appear 2-ranked. They are linear to lanceolate, and have pale green or white stomatal bands on the undersides.

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Encyclopedia

The family Taxaceae, commonly called the yew family, includes three genera and about 7 to 12 species of coniferous plant

Plant

TREE

TREE was a Boston hardcore punk band formed in the summer of 1990. They were active in the Boston music scene until disbanding in 2002....
s and shrub

Shrub

Evergreen

Plant sexuality

Plant sexuality covers the wide variety of sexual reproduction systems found across the plant kingdom. This article describes Morphology aspects of sexual reproduction of plants....
, rarely monoecious

Plant sexuality

Conifer cone

A cone is an organ on plants in the division Pinophyta that contains the plant sexuality structures. The familiar woody cone is the female cone, which produces seeds....
are 2-5 mm long, and shed pollen

Pollen

Pollen is a fine to coarse powder consisting of Gametophyte , which produce the male gametes of spermatophyta. A hard coat covering the pollen grain protects the sperm cells during the process of their movement between the stamens of the flower to the pistil of the next flower....
in the early spring. The female cones are highly reduced, with just one ovuliferous scale and one seed. As the seed matures, the ovuliferous scale develops into a fleshy aril
Aril

An aril is any specialized outgrowth from the funiculus that covers or is attached to the seed. It is sometimes applied to any appendage or thickening of the seed coat in flowering plants, such as the edible parts of the mangosteen and pomegranate fruit, or the mace of the nutmeg seed....
partly enclosing the seed. The mature aril is brightly coloured, soft, juicy and sweet, and is eaten by bird

Bird

Birds are wing, Bipedalismal, endothermic , vertebrate animals that lay egg . There are around 10,000 living species, making them the most numerous tetrapod vertebrates....
s which then disperse the hard seed undamaged in their droppings.

Classification

The Taxaceae is now generally included with all other conifers in the order Pinales
Pinales

The Order Pinales in the Division Pinophyta, Class Pinophyta comprises all the Extant taxon conifers. This order was formerly known as the Coniferales....
, as DNA

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetics instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses....
analysis has shown that the yews are monophyletic with the other families in the Pinales (Chase et al., 1993; Price, 2003), a conclusion supported by micromorphology studies (Anderson & Owens, 2003). Formerly they were often treated as distinct from other conifers by placing them in a separate order Taxales

Taxales

The plant order Taxales was in the past treated as a distinct order in the division Pinophyta, class Pinopsida, and included only those species in the family Taxaceae, known commonly as yews....
.

The genera Torreya and Amentotaxus, previously included in this family, are better transferred to the Cephalotaxaceae
Cephalotaxaceae

The family Cephalotaxaceae is a small grouping of conifers, with three genera and about 20 species, closely allied to the Taxaceae, and included in that family by some botanists....
, as genetic tests show they are more closely related to Cephalotaxus than to Taxus. Alternatively, they may be included, with Cephalotaxus, in a broader interpretation of Taxaceae as a single larger family (Price, 2003). In this sense, the Taxaceae includes six genera and about 30 species.

The differences between the Taxaceae and the Cephalotaxaceae are as follows:

Family	Taxaceae	Cephalotaxaceae
Cone aril	partly encloses seed	fully encloses seed
Cone maturation	6-8 months	18-20 months
Mature seed length	5-8 mm *	12-40 mm

* To 25 mm in Austrotaxus

A few botanists have transferred Austrotaxus to its own family, the Austrotaxaceae, suggesting it may be closer to the Podocarpaceae
Podocarpaceae

Podocarpaceae is a large family of mainly Southern Hemisphere conifers, with 18-19 genera and about 170-200 species of evergreen trees and shrubs....
than to the other Taxaceae, but genetic evidence does not support this transfer.

Others

Ernest Henry Wilson
Ernest Henry Wilson

Ernest Henry 'Chinese' Wilson , better known as E. H. Wilson, was a notable plant collector who introduced a large range of some 2000 of Asian plant species to the west; some sixty bear his name....
called Taxaceae as taxad in his book ”1916, Conifers and taxads of Japan"

Taxaceae

Classification

Others

Footnotes