In plant taxonomy, commelinids (originally commelinoids[1][2]) (plural, not capitalised) is a name used by the APG III system for a clade within the monocots, which in its turn is a clade within the angiosperms. The commelinids are the only clade that the APG has informally named within the monocots. The remaining monocots are a paraphyletic unit.
The commelinids were first recognized as a formal group in 1967 by Armen Takhtajan, who named them the Commelinidae and assigned them to a subclass of the monocots.[4] However, by the release of his 1980 system of classification, he had merged this subclass into a larger one no longer considered to be a clade.
The commelinids constitute a well-supported clade within the monocots,[5] and this clade has been recognized in all three APG classification systems. The commelinids of APG II (2003) and APG III (2009) contain essentially the same plants as the commelinoids of the earlier APG system (1998).[5]
^Dahlgren, R. M. T.; Rassmussen, F. (1983). "Monocotyledon evolution. Characters and phylogenetic estimation". Evol. Biol.16: 255–395.
^Takhtajan, A. (1967). Система и филогения цветкорых растений (Systema et Phylogenia Magnoliophytorum). Moscow: Nauka.
^ abCantino, Philip D.; James A. Doyle; Sean W. Graham; Walter S. Judd; Richard G. Olmstead; Douglas E. Soltis; Pamela S. Soltis; Michael J. Donoghue (2007). "Towards a phylogenetic nomenclature of Tracheophyta". Taxon56 (3): E1–E44. doi:10.2307/25065865.
^"An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APG III". Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society161: 105–121. 2009. doi:10.1111/j.1095-8339.2009.00996.x.