Editing Beginners Guide To Cycads (section)

===Introduction: ===
Although cycads are often grouped together with palms (e.g. Palm and Cycad Societies of
Australia), they are actually completely unrelated (apart from both being plants of course).
Cycads are in fact gymnosperms or coning plants (like pine trees), rather than angiosperms
(flowering plants, like palm trees and most other plants). Gymnosperms are much older than
angiosperms, first arriving on the scene about 240 million years ago (hence the common
name of dinosaur food), while the angiosperms are much more recent arrivals, first making an
appearance about XXX million years ago. Gymnosperms are basically the link between ferns,
and flowering plants. Prior to the arrival of the flowering plants, cycads were one of the
dominant plant groups on the planet, and were distributed all over the land surface of the
earth, however now their distribution is far more restricted (Central America, south and central
Africa, Australia, and Asia).

Cycads are also dioecious, which means that they have male and female plants, (most plants
are monoecious, or hermaphrodite, with both sexes on the same plant). Interestingly enough,
it is impossible to determine the sex of a cycad except when it cones (these are its
reproductive structures; males cones are long and thin, while the female cones are short and
squat) i.e. we still don't know how sex is determined in cycads (its almost certainly genetic,
but until someone throughs some serious money at the problem, it will remain a mystery).