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Environment
Sandy Hetherington, Plant Evolutionary Biologist, The University of Edinburgh

How a 400 million year old fossil changes our understanding of mathematical patterns in nature

The spiky branches of a monkey puzzle tree. Joshua Bruce Allen/Shutterstock

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.

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