"Cycad and Glasshouse Mountains. 16:10 format."
The Glasshouse Mountains, seen on the horizon, were formed by volcanic activity about 27 million years ago. The lineage of this male cycad (Cycas rumphi - commonly known as a Sago Palm, appearing like one but not a palm) stretches back 270 million years ago. So the cycad wins by a factor of 10. This specimen seen near Maleny is no doubt many decades old, considering their growth rates. And some can be over a thousand years old.
Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist who wrote "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", was also a naturalist and a life-long fan of cycads. He studied these ancient plants' neurotoxicity and the impact of their leaves (and less so the seeds) on human and animal brains. (Read his book on Guam Disease, "Island of the Colour Blind".)
While they are gymnosperms, having seeds exposed to air for fertilisation, as opposed to angiosperms with their enclosed seeds requiring more complex fertilisation, Sacks declares: "One cannot think of these beautiful adaptations without feeling how excellent cycads are, in their own way, and how meaningless it is to see them as 'primitive' or 'lower' plants, inferior in the scale of life to 'higher' flowering plants." They're old, but they're not simple.
