Casuarinaceae
family of plants
The Casuarinaceae are a family of dicotyledonous flowering plants placed in the order Fagales, consisting of four genera and 91 species of trees and shrubs native to eastern Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, Malesia, Papuasia, and the Pacific Islands. At one time, all species were placed in the genus Casuarina. Lawrence Alexander Sidney Johnson separated out many of those species and renamed them into the new genera of Gymnostoma in 1980 and 1982, Allocasuarina in 1982, and Ceuthostoma in 1988, with some additional formal descriptions of new species in each other genus. At the time, it was somewhat controversial. The monophyly of these genera was later supported in a 2003 phylogenetic study of the family. In the Wettstein system, this family was the only one placed in the order Verticillatae. Likewise, in the Engler, Cronquist, and Kubitzki systems, the Casuarinaceae were the only family placed in the order Casuarinales.
Members of this family are characterized by drooping equisetoid (meaning "looking like Equisetum"; that is, horsetail) twigs, evergreen foliage, monoecious or dioecious and infructescences ('fruiting bodies') strobiloid or cone-like, meaning combining many outward-pointing valves, each containing a seed, into roughly spherical, cone-like, woody structures. The roots have nitrogen-fixing nodules that contain the soil actinomycete Frankia.
In Australia, the most widely used common name for Casuarinaceae species is sheoak or she-oak (a comparison of the timber quality with English oak).
The public source identifies “Casuarinaceae” as family of plants. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Casuarinaceae, family and plants.
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This entry incorporates text from “Casuarinaceae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.