Name one primitive family of dicots and state why it is called primitive
Answers
Here is a simplified version of the phylogenetic proposal published by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group in 2016. The groups in the blue shaded area are the so-called dicots.
This proposal, which has come to be widely accepted, recognises that dicotyledonous plants form a paraphyletic group.
So the word “dicot” has no validity as a taxonomic clade. “Dicots” are flowering plants that are, well, just not monocots.
(Note that the monocots are not so troublesome: they form a nice monophyletic group.)
To those Indian students who have come to see this answer, I would like to say something.
This question and many of the previous answers to it point to a larger problem: the study of plant biology is in a pathetic state in India.
When they are young, students of biology are exposed to NCERT textbooks. And these textbooks leave no stone unturned in destroying this wonderful subject. Ancient ideas are taught with no mention of recent work, and students are expected to just swallow the text material without questioning it. After all, the ultimate aim of a biology student is to be a doctor, right? Who cares if a species is classified in this group or that? (I'm not blaming anyone. This mugging up of outdated ideas was exactly what I did in my school days.)
At the university level, poor availability of funds and egotistic professors create huge barriers for research. Therefore, plant research in India is virtually non-existent (with the possible exception of agriculture). This is indeed a sorry state of affairs.