Digitally reconstructing the pattern of leaves for a 400-million-year plant fossil shows that an early plant didn't follow the Fibonacci sequence of leaf arrangement seen in most modern plants
Matt Humpage, Northern Rogue Studiosreveals that, unlike most modern plants, some of the earliest land plants didn’t have leaves radiating out at angles that follow the Fibonacci sequence. The discovery could force a re-think of a century-old theory of leafy plant evolution.
Most modern land plants grow leaves in a spiralling pattern where their angles in relation to one another settle on the “golden ratio” derived from the famous Fibonacci sequence – a set of numbers where each is the sum of the two preceding ones, as in 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 and so on.
To investigate if the earliest land plants followed this same rule, Hetherington and his colleagues examined fossils that had been extracted from a sediment deposit called Rhynie Chert in Scotland. They chose fossils of one of the oldest leafy species preserved: the club mossThe team digitally layered thin slices of the fossils – one of which had been collected over 100 yearsA. mackiei’sA monthly celebration of the biodiversity of our planet’s animals, plants and other organisms.
“I went into this investigation assuming that we were going to find Fibonacci spirals there,” says Hetherington. “It really came as a shock.”didn’t necessarily start out growing leaves following the Fibonacci pattern. Instead, they appear to have evolved to follow that rule over the past few hundred million years.
Researchers still don’t know why so many plants have leaves that follow the Fibonacci spiral, but some speculate that it is their way of maximising the amount of sunlight that hits each leaf.
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