Leonardo da Vinci was wrong about trees. But he was pretty close.
Leonardo’s rule says that the thickness of a limb before it branches into smaller ones is the same asUsing surface area as a guide, the new rule incorporates limb widthslengths, and predicts that long branches end up being thinner than short ones. Unlike Leonardo’s guess, the updated rule works for slender birches as well as it does for sturdy oaks, the team reports.
This sketch from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks illustrates his original “rule of trees,” which posited that the thickness of a limb before it branches is the same as the combined thicknesses of all the limbs after it branches.The new Leonardo-like rule is an improvement, says Katherine McCulloh, a botanist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved with this study. But she has her doubts about the Russian group’s rationale for it.
Still, the fact that the Leonardo-like rule appears to hold for many trees intrigues McCulloh. “To me, it drives home the question of why are [trees] conserving this geometry for their external tissue, and how is that related to the microscopic level differences that we observe in wood,” she says. “It’s a really interesting question.”
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