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How a 400 million year old

fossil changes our
understanding of
mathematical patterns in
nature
Sandy Hetherington
6-7 minutes

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

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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 fossilised 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.

What are Fibonacci spirals?

Spirals occur frequently in nature and can be

seen in plant leaves, animal shells and even in
the double helix of our DNA. In most cases, these
spirals relate to the Fibonacci sequence – a set of
numbers where each is the sum of the two

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numbers that precede it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21
and so on).
These patterns are particularly widespread in
plants and can even be recognised with the
naked eye. If you pick up a pinecone and look at
the base, you can see the woody scales form
spirals that converge towards the point of
attachment with the branch.
At first, you may only spot spirals in one direction.
But look closely and you can see both clockwise
and anticlockwise spirals. Now count the number
of clockwise and anticlockwise spirals, and in
almost every case the number of spirals will be
integers in the Fibonacci sequence.

The same pinecone colour coded to show 8 clockwise

and 13 anticlockwise spirals. 8 and 13 are consecutive

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numbers in the Fibonacci series. Sandy
Hetherington, Author provided
This particular instance is not an exceptional
case. In a study that analysed 6,000 pinecones,
Fibonacci spirals were found in 97% of the
examined cones.
Fibonacci spirals are not just found in pine cones.
They are common in other plant organs such as
leaves and flowers.
If you look at the tip of a leafy shoot, such as that
of a monkey puzzle tree, you can see the leaves
are arranged in spirals that start at the tip and
gradually wind their way round the stem. A study
of 12,000 spirals from over 650 plant species
found that Fibonacci spirals occur in over 90% of
cases.
Due to their frequency in living plant species, it
has long been thought that Fibonacci spirals
were ancient and highly conserved in all plants.
We set out to test this hypothesis with an
investigation of early plant fossils.

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Examples of living plants with Fibonacci spirals. From
left to right: spirals in leaves of a monkey puzzle trees,
a pine cone and in the flower of a seaside daisy.
Sandy Hetherington, Author provided

Non-Fibonacci spirals in early plants

We examined the arrangement of leaves and

reproductive structures in the first group of plants
known to have developed leaves, called
clubmosses.
Specifically, we studied plant fossils of the extinct
clubmoss species Asteroxylon mackiei. The
fossils we studied are now housed in museum
collections in the UK and Germany but were
originally collected from the Rhynie chert – a
fossil site in northern Scotland.
We took images of thin slices of fossils and then
used digital reconstruction techniques to visualise
the arrangement of Asteroxylon mackiei’s leaves
in 3D and quantify the spirals.
Based on this analysis, we discovered that leaf

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arrangement was highly variable in Asteroxylon
mackiei. In fact, non-Fibonacci spirals were the
most common arrangement. The discovery of
non-Fibonacci spirals in such an early fossil is
surprising as they are very rare in living plant
species today.

Distinct evolutionary history

These findings change our understanding of

Fibonacci spirals in land plants. They suggest
that non-Fibonacci spirals were ancient in
clubmosses, overturning the view that all leafy
plants started out growing leaves that followed
the Fibonacci pattern.
Furthermore, it suggests that leaf evolution and
Fibonacci spirals in clubmosses had an
evolutionary history distinct from other groups of
living plants today, such as ferns, conifers and
flowering plants. It suggests that Fibonacci spirals
emerged separately multiple times throughout
plant evolution.
The work also adds another piece to the puzzle
of a major evolutionary question – why are

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Fibonacci spirals so common in plants today?
This question continues to generate debate
among scientists. Various hypotheses have been
proposed, including to maximise the amount of
light that each leaf receives or to pack seeds
efficiently. But our findings highlight how insights
from fossils and plants like clubmosses may
provide vital clues in finding an answer.

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