After locating the sites with a hand-held satellite positioning device, Lotter photographed the craters as evidence in the landscape artist's trial for theft of endangered plants. Despite such high-tech efforts to protect the endangered species, conservation officials appear to be fighting a losing battle against cycad collectors, whose passion for the primitive species threatens to destroy the very plants they love. Sometimes confused with palms and ferns, cycads are thick-trunked plants with rigid spiked leaves. They were the predominant plant species during the Jurassic period. Dinosaurs fed on cycads, and much of the coal and oil being extracted from the earth were once a cycad forest.
Some cycads are worth a lot of money.
Nurseries only sell small plants, so a collector who wants a big plant can either buy a cycad from another homeowner or get one from the wild - generally from a smuggler. They want to be big shots and have big plants. There's a lot of snob appeal in these things. Traditionally, Africans have had little use for cycads. In some cultures, people ate the starchy trunks, but they made an unappealing meal.