Wikipedia
Monimiaceae is a family of flowering plants in the magnoliid order Laurales. It is closely related to the families Hernandiaceae and Lauraceae. It consists of shrubs, small trees, and a few lianas of the tropics and subtropics, mostly in the southern hemisphere. The largest center of diversity is New Guinea, with about 75 species. Lesser centres of diversity are Madagascar, Australia, and the neotropics. Africa has one species, as does southern Chile, and several species are distributed thru Malesia and the southwest Pacific.
Monimiaceae is underrepresented in herbaria and other plant collections. Variation within the family has not been understood, resulting in an unusual proportion of monospecific genera. As of 2010, the following 11 genera were considered monospecific: Peumus, Xymalos, Kibaropsis, Austromatthaea, Hemmantia, "Endressia", Hennecartia, Macrotorus, Macropeplus, Grazielanthus, and Faika. Kairoa was monospecific until 2009.
Monimiaceae includes 24 genera with a total of ca 217 known species (Christenhusz & Byng 2016 ). The largest genera and the number of their constituent species is as follows: Tambourissa(50), Mollinedia(20-90), Kibara(43), Steganthera(17), Palmeria(14), and Hedycarya(11). The type genus, Monimia, is endemic to the Mascarenes.
The number of species in Monimiaceae has been variously estimated from about 200 to about 270. Most of this difference results from uncertainty over species limits in the tropical American genus Mollinedia. Estimates of the number of species in Mollinedia have ranged from 20 to 90. Janet Russell Perkins and Ernest Friedrich Gilg described 71 species of Mollinedia in Das Pflanzenreich in 1901, but many authors today regard this as an example of over-description.
The wood of Peumus boldus and Hedycarya arborescens is used locally, in Chile and New Zealand respectively, but is of no commercial importance. Both of these species are grown in their native regions as ornamentals. An herbal tea is made from Peumus.
The phytochemistry of a few of the genera has been studied.
Fossil wood attributed to Monimiaceae has been found in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa and on James Ross Island, Antarctica. Both of these fossil sites are roughly 83 million years old, from the Campanian stage of the Cretaceous period. Fossil leaves of Monimiaceae are known from the Paleocene of King George Island of the South Shetland Islands, near the Antarctic peninsula and from the Eocene of Patagonia.
It was long believed that the divergence of different groups within Monimiaceae could be explained by the separation of East Gondwana ( India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Seychelles, Australia, Antarctica, and New Caledonia) from West Gondwana ( Africa and South America) and by the later separation of Africa and South America. Monimiaceae was long considered to be one of the best examples of vicariance, but the dating of clades by molecular clock methods has shown that the presence of Monimiaceae in Africa and South America can be explained only by long-distance dispersal. Antarctica had coastal forests as recently as the mid- Miocene, and these could have provided an intermediate phaze in dispersal between Australia and South America.