Cycad Frond Plant Replica

$22.00

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.

Description

Cycad Frond Plant Replica measures 4.5 inches. The Cycad Frond Plant Replica is museum quality polyurethane cast made in USA. Present day plant at the cretaceous. Cycadopsida Frond. Our precise plant fossils can be used as a teaching tool for Paleobotany, museum exhibits, home décor or office décor.

Cycad Frond plants are seed plants with a very 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 Cycad Frond 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 they are not closely related to either group.

Cycads Frond plants 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. Cycad frond plants have very specialized pollinators, usually a specific species of beetle.

They have been reported to fix nitrogen in association with various cyanobacteria living in the roots (the “coralloid” roots). These photosynthetic bacteria 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.

Cycad Frond plants all over the world are in serious decline, with four species on the brink of extinction and seven species having fewer than 100 plants left in the wild.

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Additional information

Weight 2 lbs
Dimensions 4.5 in
Cycad Plant Facts:

Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Tracheophytes
Division: Cycadophyta
Class: Cycadopsida