Amborella facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Amborella
Amborella buds and flowers
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
(unranked):	Angiosperms
Division:	Magnoliophyta
Class:	Magnoliopsida
Order:	Amborellales
Family:	Amborellaceae
Genus:	Amborella
Binomial name
Amborella trichopoda

The Amborella plant

Amborella trichopoda is a special kind of small, evergreen shrub. Evergreen means its leaves stay green all year round. This plant only grows in the wet, shady parts of mountain forests. You can find it only on the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific.

This plant is the only one in its entire family, called Amborellaceae. It is also the only species in its genus. This makes Amborella very unique!

Scientists who study plants, called systematists, are very interested in Amborella. This is because DNA studies show that it is one of the oldest types of flowering plants alive today. It's like a living fossil that helps us understand how flowering plants first evolved.

Because Amborella is so ancient, it helps us learn about the features of the very first flowering plants. Scientists compare Amborella to other flowering plants. They look for features that other flowering plants have but Amborella does not. This helps them guess which features developed later on, after Amborella branched off from the main group.

The Amborellaceae family is a very old group of flowering plants. They separated from all other living flowering plants about 130 million years ago. This means Amborella is like the "sister group" to all other flowering plants we see today.

Images for kids

• 

  A specimen of Amborella in Berkeley, California

• 

  Young leaves of the Amborella plant

• 

  Close-up of buds and male flowers

• AmborellaNoLabels.jpg

  A diagram showing a female flower with its parts