The basal angiosperms are the flowering plants which diverged from the lineage leading to most flowering plants. In particular, the most basal angiosperms were called the ANITA grade, which is made up of Amborella (a single species of shrub from New Caledonia), Nymphaeales (water lilies, together with some other aquatic plants) and Austrobaileyales (woody aromatic plants including star anise).[1]
ANITA stands for Amborella, Nymphaeales, I lliciales, Trimeniaceae, and Austrobaileya.[2] Some authors have shortened this to ANA-grade for the three orders, Amborellales, Nymphaeales, and Austrobaileyales, since the order Iliciales was reduced to the family Illiciaceae and placed, along with the family Trimeniaceae, within the Austrobaileyales.
The basal angiosperms are only a few hundred species, compared with hundreds of thousands of species of eudicots, monocots, and magnoliids. They diverged from the ancestral angiosperm lineage before the five groups comprising the mesangiosperms diverged from each other.
- ^ Thien, L. B.; Bernhardt, P.; Devall, M. S.; Chen, Z.-d.; Luo, Y.-b.; Fan, J.-H.; Yuan, L.-C.; Williams, J. H. (2009), "Pollination biology of basal angiosperms (ANITA grade)", American Journal of Botany, 96 (1): 166–182, doi:10.3732/ajb.0800016, PMID 21628182
- ^ Yin-Long Qiu; Jungho Lee; Fabiana Bernasconi-Quadroni; Douglas E. Soltis; Pamela S. Soltis; Michael Zanis; Elizabeth A. Zimmer; Zhiduan Chen; Vincent Savolainen; Mark W. Chase (1999). "The earliest angiosperms: Evidence from mitochondrial, plastid and nuclear genomes". Nature. 402 (6760): 404–407. Bibcode:1999Natur.402..404Q. doi:10.1038/46536. PMID 10586879. S2CID 4380796.