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cycad
[ sahy-kad ]
noun
- any gymnospermous plant of the order Cycadales, intermediate in appearance between ferns and the palms, many species having a thick, unbranched, columnar trunk bearing a crown of large, leathery, pinnate leaves.
cycad
/ sī′kăd′ /
- Any of various evergreen plants that live in tropical and subtropical regions, have large feathery leaves, and resemble palm trees in that most leaves cluster around the top of the stem. Cycads are gymnosperms that bear conelike reproductive structures at the top of the stem, with male and female cones borne on different plants. Cycads were common in many parts of the Earth during the Jurassic Period and survive today in about 250 species. Sago palms are cycads.
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Derived Forms
- ˌcycaˈdaceous, adjective
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Other Words From
- cycad·like adjective
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Word History and Origins
Origin of cycad1
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Word History and Origins
Origin of cycad1
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Example Sentences
Abundant now, as throughout the Mesozoic, were cycads — palm-like plants with seed-producing cones.
Animals like dinosaurs and plants like cycads, says Ruffell, were “waiting in the wings” to seize their opportunity.
Therapods had a varied diet, while herbivores chowed down on ferns, cycads, and conifers, to name some ancient plants that are still around today.
As dinosaurs lumbered through the humid cycad forests of ancient South America 180 million years ago, primeval lizards scurried, unnoticed, beneath their feet.
It was thickly covered with a fine cycad which grows amongst the rocks overhanging the sea.
At Treasury Island I found a solitary cycad at a height of a thousand feet above the sea.
Bowenia, an Australian cycad, is peculiar in having bi-pinnate fronds (fig. 5).
Palms are so like cycads that we may regard them as the descendants of some cycad type.
Opposite me is a funny old cycad, not branched at all but bent.
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