As of 2010, these 11 genera were considered monospecific: Peumus, Xymalos, Kibaropsis, Austromatthaea, Hemmantia, Pendressia, Hennecartia, Macrotorus, Macropeplus, Grazielanthus, and Faika.

[8] The largest genera and the number of their constituent species is: Tambourissa (50), Mollinedia (20-90), Kibara (43), Steganthera (17), Palmeria (14), and Hedycarya (11).

[9] Janet Russell Perkins and Ernest Friedrich Gilg described 71 species of Mollinedia in Das Pflanzenreich in 1901,[10] but many authors today regard this as an example of overdescription.

The wood of Peumus boldus and Hedycarya arborescens is used locally, in Chile and New Zealand, respectively, but is of no commercial importance.

[11] Fossil wood attributed to the Monimiaceae has been found in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa and on James Ross Island, Antarctica.

[12] Divergence of different groups within Monimiaceae was long believed to be explained by the separation of East Gondwana (India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Australia, Antarctica, and New Caledonia) from West Gondwana (Africa and South America), and by the later separation of Africa and South America.

[6] Antarctica had coastal forests as recently as the mid-Miocene, and these could have provided an intermediate phase in dispersal between Australia and South America.

[9] Monimioideae Hortonioideae Mollinedioideae The family Monimiaceae was erected in 1809 by Antoine Laurent de Jussieu.

Jussieu used the now-obsolete genus names Ruizia, Ambora, Citrosma, and Pavonia (sensu Ruiz & Pavón).

Jussieu was apparently unaware that Antonio José Cavanilles had published the name Pavonia in 1786 for a genus in the Malvaceae.

[18][19] Using current names, the genera that he recognized were: Peumus, Monimia, Tambourissa, Hedycarya, Mollinedia, Kibara, Siparuna, Atherosperma, Laurelia, and Doryphora.

The second of these was mistitled as part III on its first page (compare to table of contents therein)[20] and covers the genus Siparuna, which is now grouped with Glossocalyx in the family Siparunaceae.

It was based on a specimen that was eventually shown to be a species of Erythrococca (Euphorbiaceae), but it is too fragmentary to be more precisely identified.

[25] The most recent monograph of the Monimiaceae was written by William Raymond Philipson in 1993 in a series entitled The Families and Genera of Vascular Plants.

He also included six genera that had been published after Perkins and Gilg (1901): Decarydendron, Kibaropsis, Austromatthaea, Kairoa, Faika, and Parakibara.

Beginning with the ground-breaking paper by Mark W. Chase and many coauthors in 1993,[33] the cladistic analysis of DNA sequences has contributed much to the knowledge of angiosperm phylogeny.

[34][35] By the end of the 1990s, it was evident that the traditional circumscription of Monimiaceae was paraphyletic over the monotypic family Gomortegaceae, and possibly polyphyletic, as well, because the major part of it formed a clade with the Hernandiaceae and Lauraceae.

[6][32] One study resolved Xymalos as sister to the rest of the Mollinedioideae, but this result had only weak maximum likelihood bootstrap support.