Aneuraceae (sometimes Riccardiaceae) is a

family Family (from la, familia) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its ...

thallose Thallus (plural: thalli), from Latinized Greek (), meaning "a green shoot" or "twig", is the vegetative tissue of some organisms in diverse groups such as algae, fungi, some liverworts, lichens, and the Myxogastria. Many of these organisms were ...

liverworts The Marchantiophyta () are a division of non-vascular land plants commonly referred to as hepatics or liverworts. Like mosses and hornworts, they have a gametophyte-dominant life cycle, in which cells of the plant carry only a single set of ge ...

in the

order Order, ORDER or Orders may refer to: * Categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated, and understood * Heterarchy, a system of organization wherein the elements have the potential to be ranked a number of d ...

Metzgeriales. Most species are very small with narrow, branching thalli.

Taxonomy

Aneuraceae is the largest family in the order Metzgeriales, simple thalloid liverworts. The number of species listed is considered to be inflated because of a high level of synonomy, and might be reduced from about 300 to about 100 if the family were revised. Species are difficult to delimit because nearly all are morphologically highly variable. Genetic studies suggest that some, such as ''

Aneura pinguis ''Aneura pinguis'' is a species of liverworts belonging to the family Aneuraceae. It has a cosmopolitan distribution In biogeography, cosmopolitan distribution is the term for the range of a taxon that extends across all or most of the world ...

'', include morphologically cryptic species. A

molecular phylogenetic Molecular phylogenetics () is the branch of phylogeny that analyzes genetic, hereditary molecular differences, predominantly in DNA sequences, to gain information on an organism's evolutionary relationships. From these analyses, it is possible to ...

study in 2010 produced a cladogram showing the relationships among the four genera placed in the family Aneuraceae:

References

Liverwort families Metzgeriales {{Bryophyte-stub