Ancient tropical tree

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.