Well, I suspected that there would be a lot of people out there who have no idea what a cycad is. You may have seen them but simply not known them for what they were, since one or two species are fairly common house and garden plants, for example, the sago palm. And for all that some of them look similar to palms, they are not related at all. The following text and pictures I have used from that book without permission.
Cycads are woody plants which produce seeds.
Although they may have a general appearance which is readily identifiable by most people, they are usually linked to palms or ferns, when in fact they are not related to either. Cycads are actually a unique assemblage of plants and although they are grouped with the gymnosperms they are in point of fact unrelated to any other group of living plants. Cycads certainly have a distinctive appearance which is related to their primitiveness or antiquity. Within the living seed plants they are nearly unique in that they produce motile sperm cells, and thus are an important link to the earliest of the ancient seed plants. Cycads flourished in eons past and reached their peak in the Mesozoic Era some 150 million years ago.