The ancient cycad lineage has been around since before the age of the dinosaurs. More recently, cycads also co-existed with large herbivorous mammals, such as the ice age megafauna that only went extinct a few tens of thousands of years ago. Cycads that are living today have large, heavy seeds with a fleshy outer coating that suggests they rely on large bodied fruit-eating animals to disperse their seeds. Yet there is little evidence that they are eaten and dispersed by today's larger-bodied animals, such as emus or elephants. If these plants are adapted for dispersal by a set of animals that has been missing from Earth's fauna for tens of thousands of years, then how can they still be around today? A new study proposes that the clumped dispersal mechanism these ancient plants most likely relied upon still serves them well today.
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