Mosaics can enchant humans with gestalt beauty, but for many other creatures, their worth transcends aesthetics. Repeating patterns of tilelike motifs adorn insect eyes, shark mouths, sunflower heads and many other organisms, providing a diverse array of benefits, researchers report in the November PNAS Nexus.
“These surface designs exist on literally all scales,” says biologist John Nyakatura of the Humboldt University of Berlin. “This is not something that is restricted to just a single lineage, or just a few lineages in biology,” he says. “It’s a solution that evolution found many times independently.”
#newsletter-helper svg { width: auto; fill: #f1563e; } #newsletter-helper { display: flex;