Researchers Discover How Animals Grow Their Pointy Body Parts
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Researchers discover how animals grow their pointy body parts:
An interdisciplinary team at Monash University discovered a new universal rule of biological growth that explains surprising similarities in the shapes of sharp structures across the tree of life, including teeth, horns, claws, beaks, animal shells, and even the thorns and prickles of plants.
Animals and plants often grow in specific patterns, like logarithmic spirals following the golden ratio. There are very simple processes that generate these patterns-a logarithmic spiral is produced when one side of a structure grows faster than another at a constant ratio. We can call these 'rules of growth', and they help us understand why organisms are certain shapes.
In the new study published today in BMC Biology, the research team demonstrates a new rule called the 'power cascade' based on how the shape 'cascades' down a tooth following a power law.
When an elephant tusk grows longer, it grows wider at a very specific rate following a 'power law'-a mathematical pattern where there is a straight-line relationship between the logarithm of the tooth's width and length. Power laws are found throughout nature, such as in the magnitudes of earthquakes, the sizes of cities, and the movement of the stock market.
This pattern applies across many animals, in the teeth of giant sharks, Tyrannosaurus rex, mammoths, and even humans. Remarkably, this power law works for claws, hooves, horns, spider fangs, snail shells, antlers, and the beaks of mammals, birds, and dinosaurs. Beyond animals, the team also observed it in the thorns of the rose bush and lemon tree.
Journal Reference:
Alistair R. Evans, Tahlia I. Pollock, Silke G. C. Cleuren, et al. A universal power law for modelling the growth and form of teeth, claws, horns, thorns, beaks, and shells [open], BMC Biology (DOI: 10.1186/s12915-021-00990-w)
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