This post is a sequel to a post from June of 2009, a post about the non-flowering
living fossil Ginko Biloba trees that find themselves all around the world.
Down here in the Long Beach corner of Southern California, in my neighborhood there are two different examples of more or less living fossil trees/plants.
The first they have along Broadway in some decorative locations. They are the fern trees:
Ferns are some of the oldest plants that aren't mosses. They don't respawn themselves from seed, rather they use especially tiny spores and the wind to replicate themselves. Having been around for hundreds of millions of years, they predate both the conifers and the flowering plants by many eons.
The view of the center of the fern, where new arms unfurl themselves is one of the recognizable characteristics of ferns.
The next plant is more of a small tree, but given enough time it could grow into what we today consider "tree-size". It's so ancient that it just does its own thing, and today we think it's small relative to the conifers and flowering trees that came later, and even smaller than the fern-trees from above. It's not older than ferns, but is older than conifers and flowering plants, and only related to seeded plants from very far back. I'm talking about cycads:
They look similar to palms, but have tougher fronds built of conifer-like waxy needles. The tips are sharp and annoying, and near the base of each fronds stalk are a series of serrated edges, making it a formidable plant indeed. The trunk, which may be hard to see here, is similar to the fern-tree.
The fronds don't really unfurl the way the fern's do, but they do propagate from the center. This plant, and others in the cycadia family, developed maybe one-hundred-fifty-million years ago in order to survive big, tough plant eating dinosaurs. The dinosaurs, in-turn, evolved into even tougher plant eaters, and the biggest and baddest digesters in the world aty the time, the triceratops and ankylosaurs of the later Cretacious, right before the extinction event 65 MYA, were able to digest this pointy wonder.
Today they grow naturally in random spots around the world, in Africa and South America. But they are hardy and look nice, and they have been used as decorative plants on more than a few occasions. The one I took pictures of is outside the four-plex I live in.
Also, in 2011, in the post about
Zilker Prehistoric Garden in Austin, I incorrectly call the cycad that's growing out of a rock "an ancient palm". Cycads and palms are only very loosely related and developed similar looks through separate lines of evolution.
