A family of rust fungi classified by mycologists, though the term is now largely obsolete as modern taxonomy has reorganized rust fungi into different groupings.
From aecidium + -aceae (suffix denoting a family in biological classification). This represents an older taxonomic system from the 19th-20th centuries when fungi were classified partly by their spore-producing structures.
Aecidiaceae is a ghost category in mycology—scientists named it when they thought rust fungi groups could be defined by their aecium structure, but genetic testing in the 1990s proved the structure didn't align with actual evolutionary relationships, so it got abandoned.
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