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|63226. Sat Apr 01, 2006 5:39 am
What colour is a dicot?
There are 175,000 species of them, so this is something everyone should really know.
(I can't think of anything witty and clever or indeed a really smart way of phrasing the question perhaps someone else can).
Pretty much any colour. Most flowers are dicots.
Most common garden flowers, shrubs, trees and broad-leaved flowering plants such as magnolias, geraniums, hollyhocks and roses are dicots. About 50% of dicot species are trees.
Dicots is the commonly used shorthand name for dicotyledonous plants, the larger of the two great groups of flowering plants. The other is the monocots or monocotyledonous plants.
Lilies, orchids, irises, palms and grasses are monocots.
The word cotyledon is Latin, from the Greek kotuledon, a cup-shaped hollow -such as the suckers of an octopus or the socket of a hip-joint. This comes in turn from kotule, a cup.
Kotule, was also used, in ancient Greek, as 'cup' is in English, to mean a measure ie a cupful in ancient Greece this amounted to just under half a pint.
Question: DICOT written on screen
Answer: Bunch of lovely DICOTS (specially shot?)
Flowering plants are technically known as angiosperms. Dicots are technically known as Magnoliopsida; monocots as Liliopsida.
Dicots are usually (but not always) characterized by a pair of seed leaves or 'cotyledons' in the embryo inside the seed. They also usually (but not always) have flower parts sepals, petals, stamens etc based on a plan of four or five, or multiples thereof.
Cotyledon was the Latin word for the navelwort or pennywort and is sometimes still so used in English.
Intended to follow a question about Didcot. If there isn't a question about Didcot it's obviously not really worth doing.
s: EBR 1994
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