Tracking Fibonacci Spirals in Plant Evolution and Morphology
Patterns permeate through every aspect of the biology that makes up our lives, from the helicoid structures that form the building blocks of our beings to the arrangement of the hairs on your head.
Interpreting these patterns is intrinsic to bettering our fundamental understanding of what it means to be alive, and this can subsequently help to improve the level and quality of treatment we receive for issues such as genetic disorders.
This understanding can extend to trends in the plant kingdom, where a recent study by a research team from the University of Edinburgh has analysed the primacy of Fibonacci spirals in today's flora and fauna.
Spirals are a common feature in nature, occurring in everything from animal shells and plant leaves to the double helix of our DNA.
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Often, these patterns relate to the Fibonacci sequence, where each number in the sequence is the sum of the two numbers before it – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on.
Plants such as pinecones are particularly telling for demonstrating the Fibonacci sequence; in a previous study analysing 6,000 pinecones, Fibonacci spirals were found in 97% of the cones examined.
The prevalence of Fibonacci spirals in plants today is sufficient for the research community to hold them to be an ancient, highly-conserved feature dating back to the earliest stages of plant evolution.
The Absence of Fibonacci Spirals in Plant Fossils
However, the study from the University of Edinburgh, published in Science, examined spirals in the leaves and reproductive structures of a fossilised plant dating back 407 million years.
The study found that, in clubmosses – some of the first plants to have developed leaves – leaf arrangement was highly variable, with non-Fibonacci spirals the more common arrangement.
One key finding suggested that Fibonacci-style patterning was not ancestral to living land plants.
Additionally, lymphocyte leaves were believed to have originated from modified reproductive structures rather than evolving de novo.
In light of this new information, the suggestion is now that non-Fibonacci spirals were ancient in clubmosses.
Other groups of today's living plants – such as ferns, conifers, and flowering plants – may have had a distinct evolutionary history which followed a separate trajectory.
As such, Fibonacci spirals could have emerged separately in plants multiple times throughout their evolution.
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