If your eyes have ever been drawn to the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem, the texture of a pineapple, or the scales of a pinecone, then you have unknowingly witnessed brilliant examples of mathematical patterns in nature.
What ties all of these botanical features together is their shared characteristic of being arranged in spirals that adhere to a numerical sequence called the Fibonacci sequence. These spirals, referred to as Fibonacci spirals for simplicity, are extremely widespread in plants and have fascinated scientists from Leonardo da Vinci to Charles Darwin.
Such is the prevalence of Fibonacci spirals in plants today that they are believed to represent an ancient and highly conserved feature, dating back to the earliest stages of plant evolution and persisting in their present forms.
However, our new study challenges this viewpoint. We examined the spirals in the leaves and reproductive structures of a fossilized plant dating back 407 million years. Surprisingly, we discovered that all of the spirals observed in this particular species did not follow this same rule. Today, only a very few plants don’t follow a Fibonacci pattern.
Read more at theconversation.com