Crossword clues for cycad
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Cycad \Cy"cad\ (s[imac]"k[a^]d), n. (Bot.) Any plant of the natural order Cycadace[ae], as the sago palm, etc.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1845, Modern Latin, from Greek kykas, a word found in Theophrastus, but now thought to be a scribal error for koikas "palm trees," accusative plural of koix, a word from an unknown non-Greek language.
Wiktionary
n. (context botany English) Any plant of the division Cycadophyta, as the sago palm, etc.
WordNet
n. any tropical gymnosperm of the order Cycadales; having unbranched stems with a crown of fernlike leaves
Wikipedia
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Cycads are seed plants with a long fossil history that were formerly more abundant and more diverse than they are today. They typically have a stout and woody ( ligneous) trunk with a crown of large, hard and stiff, evergreen leaves. They usually have pinnate leaves. The individual plants are either all male or all female ( dioecious). Cycads vary in size from having trunks only a few centimeters to several meters tall. They typically grow very slowly and live very long, with some specimens known to be as much as 1,000 years old. Because of their superficial resemblance, they are sometimes mistaken for palms or ferns, but are only distantly related to either.
The living cycads are found across much of the subtropical and tropical parts of the world. The greatest diversity occurs in South and Central America. They are also found in Mexico, the Antilles, southeastern United States, Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and southern and tropical Africa, where at least 65 species occur. Some can survive in harsh desert or semi-desert climates ( xerophytic), others in wet rain forest conditions, and some in both. Some can grow in sand or even on rock, some in oxygen-poor, swampy, bog-like soils rich in organic material. Some are able to grow in full sun, some in full shade, and some in both. Some are salt tolerant ( halophytes).
The three extant families of cycads are Cycadaceae, Stangeriaceae, and Zamiaceae. Cycads have changed little since the Jurassic, compared to some major evolutionary changes in other plant divisions.
Cycads are gymnosperms (naked seeded), meaning their unfertilized seeds are open to the air to be directly fertilized by pollination, as contrasted with angiosperms, which have enclosed seeds with more complex fertilization arrangements. Cycads have very specialized pollinators, usually a specific species of beetle. They have been reported to fix nitrogen in association with a cyanobacterium living in the roots. These blue-green algae produce a neurotoxin called BMAA that is found in the seeds of cycads. This neurotoxin may enter a human food chain as the cycad seeds may be eaten directly as a source of flour by humans or by wild or feral animals such as bats, and humans may eat these animals. It is hypothesized that this is a source of some neurological diseases in humans.
Usage examples of "cycad".
For real trees we had araucarias, trees of the ginkgo type, and cycads looking much like palms.
Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year.
Peering ahead with a spyglass, Audubon saw countless dark valleys half hidden by the pines and cycads that gave the mountains their name.
The trees were cycads, tall trees with rough bark that resembled palms, squat cycadeoids looking oddly like giant pineapples, and ginkgoes with their odd, fan-shaped leaves, an already ancient lineage that would survive into the human era and beyond.
Many of the land plants in the Permian Period such as conifers, sphenopsids, ferns, and seed ferns continued into the Triassic, while other gymnosperms such as cycads, cycadeoids and ginkgos appeared for the first time.
The cycads, cycadeoids, conifers, and ginkgos formed the tropical forests in many parts of the world during the Triassic Period.
Cycads and cycadeoids, collectively known as the cycadophytes, grew as shrubs and small trees, some occupying the undergrowth in the conifer forests, and others living in the open under drier conditions.
A herd of enormous medium to high browsing herbivores could easily overgraze conifers and cycads, leaving open spaces in which the fast-growing seeds of flowering plants could prosper.
Zoas wandered, in twos and threes, away from the swamp, toward a distant grove of giant redwood trees, gathering samples of ferns, palmlike cycads, tasting the nuts and fruits of the ginkgos.
To her the most ferocious flying creature was of much less immediate peril than the predators who might lurk under these cycads, the scorpions and spiders and ever-ravenous carnivorous reptiles, including the many, many small and savage dinosaur species.
Jurassic herbivores that had once feasted on cycads, ferns, and conifers.
Dinosaurs dominated a land covered with cycads, ferns, gingkos and conifers.
They flew out of the canyon mouth and mountains at high speed and soared over high grasslands sprinkled with towering cycads and fern-topped trees.
And in the plainlike reaches between slush and mountain, where fern trees and cycads were particularly lush, were herds of Triceratops, plus scattered Ankylosauruses, both armored reptiles of considerable mass.
The previously unexploited highlands of southeastern Australia began to be visited regularly during the summer, by Aborigines feasting not only on cycad nuts and yams but also on huge hibernating aggregations of a migratory moth called the bogong moth, which tastes like a roasted chestnut when grilled.