T he world of botany is usually pretty good at following certain rules. It was previously thought that because the Fibonacci sequence is present in the structure of so many extant plant species, it must have evolved in some of the earliest living plant species. However, an ancient species, one of the first examples of a plant with leaves in the fossil record, has thrown a spanner into the understanding of this by having leaves arranged in such a way that Fibonacci numbers can’t describe. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. The sequence starts with 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on. Most living plants have organs that e

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