Kerry Ferguson — Science + Art Research Series Essay | 2026
Citation Ferguson, K. (2026). Learning from Nature: Biomimicry, Bioinspiration and the Difference Between Copying Form and Understanding Function. Kerry Ferguson — Science + Art Research Series.
We have always learned from nature. We have watched birds fly, studied the strength of wood, woven plant fibres, used shells as containers, extracted medicines from plants and built shelters in response to climate.
Contemporary biomimicry gives this ancient behaviour a more systematic form.
Instead of simply admiring biological structures, researchers ask how they work. Engineers identify physical principles. Materials scientists study hierarchical organisation. Architects investigate passive environmental responses. Chemists examine biological synthesis. Designers translate these observations into new materials, structures and systems.
The difference is important. A building shaped like a leaf may be inspired by nature. A surface patterned like a lotus leaf may visually resemble nature. But a material designed to reproduce the water-repellent mechanism associated with microscopic lotus-leaf surface structures is operating at another level. The first copies appearance. The second investigates function. Biomimicry becomes most powerful when nature stops being an image and becomes a source of biological knowledge.
What Is Biomimicry?
The terminology surrounding biomimicry is not always used consistently. Terms including biomimicry, biomimetics, bioinspiration, bio-inspired design and bio-informed design can overlap, while different disciplines emphasise different meanings.
At the broadest level, these approaches use biological systems as sources of ideas for design and technology. The distinction becomes clearer when we ask how deeply the biological source has been understood.
A nature-inspired object may simply borrow an organic shape. A biomimetic design attempts to reproduce or translate a biological mechanism or function. A bio-informed design goes further by grounding the design explicitly in scientific evidence concerning the biological principle being transferred.
A recent 2026 framework proposed that genuinely bio-informed designs should be based on scientific evidence of a fundamental biological principle that is abstracted and then incorporated into the design process.
This distinction is particularly relevant to Science + Art. The deeper the biological understanding, the less literal the resulting design needs to become.
Nature as Image
The simplest form of nature-inspired design begins visually. Leaves become roof forms.
Flowers become lamps. Honeycomb becomes pattern. Shells become architecture. This can produce beautiful and meaningful work. There is no reason to dismiss it.
Art has always transformed visible forms from the natural world.
The limitation appears only when visual resemblance is presented as though it were equivalent to biological understanding. A honeycomb pattern applied to a wall does not necessarily reproduce the structural efficiency of a honeycomb. A leaf-shaped building does not necessarily capture the environmental performance of a leaf. A spiral does not become biomimetic simply because spirals occur in nature. Form is evidence. But it is only the beginning of the investigation.
From Form to Function
The next question is deceptively simple: Why does this structure exist?
A leaf has a particular form partly because it must capture light, exchange gases, manage water and survive mechanical forces. A root branches because it must explore soil and acquire resources. A seed structure may assist dispersal. A cactus surface exists within a system of water management, temperature control and protection. A shell is shaped by growth, mechanical loading and biological history.
Once function enters the discussion, the biological form changes meaning. It is no longer merely something to copy. It becomes evidence of a solution to a particular biological problem. This is where meaningful biomimicry begins.
Function Is Contextual
Biological structures do not exist in isolation from their environments.
A leaf adapted to a rainforest understory exists under different pressures from a leaf exposed to intense arid sunlight. A mangrove root solves different problems from a rainforest epiphyte. A desert plant and a tropical plant may both manage water, but the strategies they use can differ dramatically. This matters because biomimicry can become misleading when a biological feature is removed from context.
The question should not simply be: What does this structure do? It should also be:
Under what conditions does it do it? A biological strategy is meaningful because of the environment in which it evolved.
Evolution Does Not Engineer Perfect Solutions
Biomimicry literature sometimes describes nature as though evolution were an engineer working towards perfection.
Evolution does not work that way. Natural selection operates on inherited variation under historical and environmental constraints. Organisms carry traces of evolutionary history. Structures may perform several functions simultaneously. A solution can persist because it is sufficiently successful, not because it represents the theoretically optimal engineering solution. This distinction is essential. Nature is not a catalogue of perfect products. It is a record of successful compromises. That makes it more interesting, not less.
Biological Trade-Offs
A tree cannot maximise strength without considering the energetic cost of producing tissue. A leaf cannot maximise surface area without becoming vulnerable to water loss or mechanical damage. A flower cannot invest unlimited resources in attraction. Living organisms continually operate within constraints.
This produces trade-offs. Strength versus weight. Growth versus defence. Reproduction versus maintenance. Water capture versus water loss. Rigidity versus flexibility. Human engineering often faces equivalent conflicts.
Biomimicry can therefore be particularly useful not because nature reveals a perfect answer but because it demonstrates ways of negotiating multiple competing requirements.
The Lotus Effect
One of the most familiar biomimetic examples is the lotus leaf. Lotus leaves are associated with highly water-repellent and self-cleaning surfaces. Their behaviour does not arise simply because the leaf is made from a naturally water-resistant substance. Microscopic and nanoscale surface structures, combined with surface chemistry, influence how water droplets contact the leaf. Water beads and can remove contaminating particles as it moves.
Researchers subsequently translated these principles into engineered superhydrophobic and self-cleaning surfaces.
The important lesson is not that products should look like lotus leaves. They usually do not. The transferred principle concerns surface architecture and wetting behaviour.
This is biomimicry through abstraction.
The Difference Between a Lotus Pattern and a Lotus Principle
Imagine two textiles. The first contains a beautifully drawn repeat pattern of lotus leaves. The second contains a surface engineered to manipulate water through microstructure inspired by plant surfaces. Both are inspired by the lotus. They operate at completely different levels. The first communicates botanical identity visually. The second translates functional knowledge.
Science + Art does not need to choose between them. An artwork could contain the visual lotus and simultaneously investigate water behaviour. The important requirement is clarity about what kind of relationship with nature is being claimed.
Velcro and the Burdock Burr
Another famous example concerns the development of hook-and-loop fasteners after observation of plant burrs attaching themselves to fur and clothing.
The biological model worked through mechanical attachment. The innovation did not reproduce the burr itself. It abstracted the hook mechanism. This example is often repeated because it demonstrates biomimicry clearly.
Observation leads to biological investigation. The biological mechanism is abstracted. The mechanism is reproduced using completely different materials and manufacturing methods. The finished technology no longer resembles the organism closely. Successful abstraction can make biomimicry visually invisible.
Plants as Underused Models
Plants have enormous potential as sources of bioinspiration. They solve problems involving light capture, fluid transport, mechanical support, water management, adhesion, defence, chemical synthesis, environmental sensing and movement while remaining largely rooted in place.
Yet recent analysis suggests that biomimetic research has concentrated disproportionately on a relatively small number of biological models.
A 2025 study analysing 74,359 publications identified more than 31,000 biological models, but animals represented over 75% of identified model references by the end of 2024, while plants represented approximately 16%. Only 1,604 model organisms were resolved to species level.
This suggests a significant opportunity. Plants remain comparatively underexplored as sources of innovation.
Biodiversity as a Research Library
Earth contains an extraordinary diversity of biological solutions. Different organisms have encountered similar problems and sometimes evolved very different responses. Others have independently evolved structurally similar strategies.
Recent biomimicry research has begun arguing that the field should move beyond repeatedly studying a small group of iconic species and make greater use of biodiversity and comparative biology.
This changes the research model. Instead of asking: Which famous organism solves my problem? we might ask: Which organisms have encountered this problem, and how many different solutions have evolution produced? The result could be a much richer biological design library.
Comparison Is More Powerful Than Imitation
Suppose an engineer needs a lightweight structure capable of resisting impact.
One approach would be to select one biological example and imitate it.
Another would be to compare several organisms that independently evolved lightweight impact-resistant structures.
The similarities between them may reveal more fundamental design principles.
This is the importance of convergent evolution for biomimicry. When similar strategies arise independently under similar functional pressures, those strategies may be particularly informative. Recent materials research has highlighted convergent biological strategies including struts, sutures and helicoidal structures across different organisms. Evolution itself can become a comparative experiment.
Struts, Sutures and Helicoids
These three structural principles illustrate the value of looking beyond surface appearance.
Strut-based structures can provide lightweight load-bearing organisation. Suture-like interfaces can help manage stresses where different components meet. Helicoidal structures can improve resistance to fracture and impact by forcing cracks to follow more complex paths.
The organisms displaying these structures may look completely unrelated. What connects them is function. This is the level at which biomimicry becomes particularly powerful. The biological model becomes a source of structural principle rather than visual motif.
From Biological Principle to Concrete
A striking contemporary example demonstrates how far abstraction can travel.
Researchers have applied bioinspired helicoidal architectures to concrete, using additive manufacturing to create structures designed to improve fracture resistance.
Concrete does not resemble the biological tissues from which the structural principle was derived. Nor does it need to. The connection exists in architecture. The arrangement of material alters the way cracks propagate and energy is dissipated. This is biomimicry at its most intellectually interesting. Biology provides the strategy. Engineering creates another material world around it.
Hierarchy
One of the recurring characteristics of biological materials is hierarchy. Structures operate simultaneously across several scales. A shell visible to the eye contains microscopic organisations. Those contain nanoscale arrangements. Mechanical performance emerges from interactions among them.
Traditional manufacturing historically struggled to reproduce this degree of multiscale organisation. Advanced additive manufacturing and materials engineering increasingly make it possible to design structure across multiple scales. Biology therefore becomes particularly relevant as manufacturing capability becomes more sophisticated. We are increasingly able to build some of the structural complexity we have long observed.
Nature Manufactures Differently
Biological systems generally manufacture under conditions very different from conventional industry. Plants build structures through growth. Materials are deposited locally. Self-assembly occurs. Water is frequently the processing environment. Manufacturing takes place at relatively moderate temperatures and pressures. Waste streams often become resources within larger ecological systems. This does not mean biological manufacture can simply replace industrial processing. The production rates, tolerances and functional requirements are different. But biological fabrication strategies challenge assumptions about how materials must be made. The process can be as inspirational as the finished structure.
Biomimicry of Process
Biomimicry is frequently associated with form.
Process can be equally important. How does a spider produce fibre? How does a mollusc construct shell? How does a plant assemble cellulose structures? How do organisms mineralise materials under ambient conditions? How does biological self-assembly create complex structures from relatively simple components?
These questions shift biomimicry into manufacturing science. Instead of copying what nature makes, we begin asking how nature makes it. This is especially important for sustainable materials research.
Plants as Chemical Models
Plants provide another form of process inspiration through chemistry. They manufacture complex molecules using enzymes and biochemical pathways under biological conditions. This includes: pigments, terpenes, phenolics, structural polymers, volatile compounds and protective waxes.
Industry often manufactures chemicals through very different processes involving temperature, pressure, catalysts and solvents.
Synthetic biology and green chemistry increasingly explore whether biological pathways can inspire or directly enable different manufacturing approaches.
This creates a direct connection with Plants as Chemical Engineers. Biomimicry is not confined to visible structures. It can occur at the molecular and biochemical level.
Water Management
Plants provide extraordinary examples of water-related strategies. Some collect water. Some repel it. Some transport it through capillary and vascular systems. Some minimise evaporation. Some change their structures according to humidity. These strategies operate at different scales and through different physical principles.
For architecture, textiles and materials, water management is a major functional challenge. The obvious mistake would be to search for one “best” plant. Different botanical strategies may suit different human problems. Biomimicry begins with careful problem definition.
Passive Response
Some biological structures respond to their environments without nerves, motors or centralised control. Pine cones provide a familiar example. Changes in humidity create differential swelling in tissues, causing scales to open or close. The environmental condition both provides the information and drives the movement. There is no separate sensor, processor and motor. The intelligence is embedded in material structure.
This principle has inspired hygromorphic materials and responsive architectural systems. It demonstrates an important advantage of biological thinking: the material itself can become the mechanism.
From Pine Cone to Architecture
A conventional responsive facade might use electronic sensors, actuators and control systems. A biomimetic alternative might investigate whether material geometry could respond passively to humidity, temperature or light. The resulting architecture would not need to resemble a pine cone.
Its biomimetic relationship would exist in the principle of passive environmental response. This represents a much deeper translation than copying biological shape.
Nature becomes relevant to building performance rather than merely building appearance.
Biomimetic Skins
Building envelopes are particularly suited to biomimetic thinking because biological skins, leaves and surfaces also manage boundaries between internal and external environments. They regulate exchanges. Respond to temperature. Manage water. Control light. Protect internal tissues.
Architectural research has therefore explored adaptive building skins inspired by biological systems. The strongest examples do not ask what a biological surface looks like. They ask what environmental problem the surface solves and whether the mechanism can be translated into architecture.
Biomimicry and Sustainability
Biomimicry is frequently associated with sustainability. The relationship is attractive but requires caution. A biomimetic product is not automatically sustainable. A surface inspired by a lotus leaf could still be manufactured from environmentally damaging materials. A bioinspired lightweight structure could be difficult to recycle. An adaptive building system could require substantial embodied energy.
The biological origin of the idea does not guarantee the environmental performance of the result. Sustainability must still be assessed across materials, energy, manufacturing, use and end-of-life. Biomimicry can inform sustainability. It cannot substitute for it.
Ecosystem-Level Biomimicry
Biomimicry can also move beyond individual organisms. Ecosystems provide models of flows, relationships, cycling and redundancy. Materials move through food webs and decomposition pathways. Waste from one process becomes input to another. Diversity contributes to system resilience.
However, ecosystem-level biomimicry is particularly challenging. Ecosystems are not engineered production systems. Their complexity emerges through evolutionary and ecological relationships. Simplifying them into slogans such as “nature has no waste” can obscure important realities. The useful lesson lies in studying flows and relationships, not idealising ecosystems.
Biomimicry and Circularity
The idea that outputs from one process can become inputs to another has obvious relevance to circular manufacturing.
Agricultural residues can become raw materials. Waste heat can be recovered. Water can circulate through systems. Products can be designed for disassembly.
These strategies need not be described as biomimetic to be valuable. But ecological thinking encourages designers to look beyond individual products towards networks of material flows. This system-level perspective aligns strongly with the wider concept of The Intelligence of the Natural World. The object is only part of the system.
The Danger of Biological Storytelling
Biomimicry can become vulnerable to attractive but inaccurate biological stories. A designer may encounter a simplified description of an organism and build an entire concept around it.
If the biological mechanism is wrong, the design may still be interesting, but its biomimetic claim becomes weak. This is one reason stronger collaboration between biologists and designers is increasingly advocated.
The 2025 analysis of biomimetic literature specifically argues for greater biological specificity, broader taxonomic exploration and greater use of comparative approaches.
Scientific accuracy should therefore form part of the design method.
Bio-Informed Design
The emerging concept of bio-informed design is particularly useful here.
It places greater emphasis on the scientific evidence supporting the biological principle.
A 2026 reporting framework argues that bio-informed design should identify the biological model, establish the scientific evidence for the relevant principle, abstract that principle and make transparent how it has been translated into the engineered design.
This is close to the methodology appropriate for the Kerry Ferguson Science + Art series. The science should remain identifiable. The translation should remain transparent. The artwork or design should not pretend to be biological research. The relationship between the two should be intellectually traceable.
The Science + Art Opportunity
Art does not need to produce a functional engineering solution. Its relationship with biomimicry can therefore be more exploratory. A biological mechanism can generate material questions. What would a textile look like if reinforcement followed stress rather than decoration? What happens if colour changes according to viewing angle rather than pigment? Can humidity become part of the work? Can branching rules generate pattern? Can repair remain visible? Can a surface collect and redirect water?
The artwork becomes an environment for testing ideas about biological strategy. Its success is judged differently from an engineering prototype. But it can still begin from rigorous biological understanding. Copying the Object.
We can therefore imagine three progressively deeper ways of working with nature.
The first is copying the object. A leaf becomes a motif. A shell becomes a sculpture. A flower becomes a lamp. This is visually inspired design. It can be beautiful and culturally meaningful. But the biological relationship is primarily representational.
Copying the Mechanism
The second level is translating the mechanism. A lotus surface inspires water-repellent material. A burr inspires mechanical attachment. A helicoidal biological composite inspires crack-resistant architecture. A pine cone inspires humidity-responsive movement.
The finished object may look nothing like the biological source. Its relationship with nature is functional. This is biomimicry in a stronger sense.
Understanding the Principle
The third level is more abstract. Rather than copying one mechanism directly, the designer identifies a broader principle. Hierarchical organisation. Distributed control. Passive response. Material economy. Variation within constraints. Redundancy. Adaptive growth. Closed-loop material flows. The principle can then influence many different forms. This is where biomimicry begins to become a way of thinking.
Beyond the Single Organism
The next step may be comparative. Instead of selecting one organism, researchers can investigate several independent biological solutions to the same problem. This allows similarities and differences to become visible.
A 2025 analysis found that fewer than 9% of biomimetic publications identifying biological models used multiple models, and fewer than 2% contained terms associated with comparative or convergent evolutionary approaches.
That represents an enormous opportunity. Biomimicry can become more evolutionary.
Instead of copying one organism, we can ask what repeated evolutionary solutions reveal.
The Unexplored Biological Library
The scale of the opportunity is striking. The same 2025 research identified only 1,604 species used as species-level models across the literature it analysed, with a very small number of organisms receiving disproportionate attention.
Earth’s biodiversity is vastly larger. Most species have never become recognised biomimetic models. Some are poorly studied scientifically. Others may possess well-documented biological strategies but remain outside engineering awareness.
This suggests that future biomimicry will depend partly on better connections between biological research and design problems. The library exists. We have explored only a small section.
Plants as a New Biomimicry Frontier
Plants are particularly important within this unexplored space. They solve problems differently from mobile animals. They cannot generally escape adverse environmental conditions. Their strategies therefore emphasise growth, chemistry, structural adaptation, passive movement and environmental responsiveness.
Plants manage: light; water; mechanical loading; surface contamination; temperature; chemical defence; volatile signalling; fluid transport; growth; repair; and reproduction.
They do so through systems capable of operating with comparatively low material and energy inputs. This makes botanical biology particularly fertile territory for biomimicry.
Botanical Innovations and Biomimicry
There is an interesting boundary here with Botanical Innovations. Botanical Innovations primarily investigates what plant chemistry can become as an ingredient. Biomimicry asks a different question. What can we learn from how the plant creates, protects, stores or uses that chemistry?
The compound itself may become a commercial ingredient. The biological strategy surrounding it may inspire another technology entirely. These are complementary approaches. One extracts value from botanical chemistry. The other extracts knowledge from botanical function.
Dangerous Beauty and Biomimicry
Dangerous Beauty approaches the same natural systems from another direction.
Art begins with observation, pattern, colour and material.
Biomimicry can deepen those sources. A leaf pattern becomes more interesting when the venation is understood as transport and support. A structural colour becomes more interesting when its optical mechanism is understood. A crack becomes more interesting when biological materials reveal strategies for controlling fracture.
The artistic work no longer needs to copy the biological form. Scientific understanding frees it to become more abstract.
From Nature-Inspired to Nature-Informed Art
This distinction may ultimately be one of the most important outcomes of the Science + Art series.
Nature-inspired art starts with what nature looks like. Nature-informed art starts with what scientific research reveals about how nature works. A work might still be visually beautiful. It might still contain leaves or flowers. But its conceptual structure changes. Pattern can derive from transport. Layering from fracture resistance. Colour from optical structure. Movement from humidity response. Variation from adaptive growth. The artwork carries biological knowledge without becoming scientific illustration.
Ethical Questions
Biomimicry also raises ethical questions.
Biological knowledge is not culturally or geographically neutral. Indigenous peoples and local communities may hold sophisticated knowledge of organisms and ecosystems that long predates scientific publication. The commercial translation of biological knowledge can therefore raise questions concerning attribution, benefit sharing, intellectual property and bioprospecting.
Designers and researchers should be careful not to treat nature—or traditional knowledge associated with nature—as a free repository waiting to be exploited.
Learning from biological systems carries responsibilities.
Biomimicry and Place
Biomimicry can become more meaningful when connected with local environments.
Rather than repeatedly drawing upon internationally famous models such as geckos, lotus leaves and shark skin, designers can investigate organisms adapted to the environments in which their designs will operate.
A tropical building might learn from tropical organisms. An arid environment might direct attention towards species adapted to heat and water limitation.
Local biology can provide locally relevant strategies. This does not mean every biological solution should remain geographically restricted. It means place can help define the problem.
The Daintree as a Biological Design Library
The Daintree and wider Wet Tropics provide an extraordinary potential landscape for bioinspired research.
Plants there solve problems associated with intense rainfall, competition for light, high humidity, nutrient limitations, climbing, water shedding and biological interactions.
The artistic project already examines these systems visually. Science + Art could eventually examine them functionally. The rainforest becomes not only a subject for pattern but a living design library.
Any future research of this kind, however, would require careful biological collaboration and respect for conservation and cultural knowledge. Observation should not become extraction without responsibility.
Biomimicry from the Past
Bioinspiration does not need to be restricted to living organisms. The fossil record contains structures and biological strategies from organisms that no longer exist. A 2025 paper proposed the concept of palaeo-bioinspiration, arguing that extinct organisms represent another largely unexplored source of biological design knowledge. This extends the idea of deep time in an unexpected direction.
Evolution’s design library includes failed, extinct and transitional forms as well as living species. The archive is much larger than the present biosphere.
The Intelligence of the Natural World
Biomimicry ultimately belongs within the wider idea of The Intelligence of the Natural World because it asks whether natural systems contain principles from which we can learn. The phrase should not imply that evolution consciously engineered solutions for our benefit. It means something more interesting. Natural systems contain accumulated evidence of responses to environmental problems. Millions of species represent millions of different evolutionary experiments. Some strategies have persisted. Others disappeared. Some arose independently several times.
Science allows us to understand those strategies. Design allows us to translate them. Art allows us to interpret what they mean.
A Framework for Responsible Biomimicry
A rigorous biomimicry project can proceed through several stages.
First, define the human problem clearly rather than beginning with an attractive organism.
Second, identify biological systems that encounter an analogous functional problem.
Third, understand the biological mechanism using reliable scientific evidence.
Fourth, compare several biological models where possible rather than assuming the first example represents the only solution.
Fifth, abstract the principle from the organism.
Sixth, translate the principle into a different material or design system.
Seventh, test whether the resulting design actually performs the intended function.
Eighth, evaluate its environmental and social consequences rather than assuming bioinspiration guarantees sustainability.
Finally, acknowledge the biological and cultural sources of the knowledge being used.
This is more demanding than copying form. It is also far more interesting.
Conclusion
Nature has always influenced design. We have borrowed its shapes, colours and structures for thousands of years.
Biomimicry asks us to look more deeply. A lotus leaf becomes a lesson in wetting and surface architecture. A burr becomes a lesson in attachment. A pine cone becomes a lesson in passive environmental response. A shell becomes a lesson in hierarchical materials. A leaf becomes a lesson in distribution, lightweight structure and environmental exchange. A plant becomes a lesson in chemistry, sensing and adaptation. The biological form is only the entrance. The real subject is the principle beneath the form.
Recent research suggests that biomimicry itself still has enormous room to mature. The field continues to draw disproportionately from a narrow selection of biological models, uses relatively few comparative evolutionary approaches and has explored only a very small fraction of Earth’s biological diversity in depth.
This is especially significant for plants. Botanical diversity represents a vast archive of structural, chemical and ecological strategies that remains comparatively underused within biomimetic research.
The opportunity for Science + Art is therefore not simply to celebrate familiar examples of biomimicry. It is to participate in a broader change of perspective. We can move from copying what nature looks like to understanding what biological systems do. From understanding what they do to asking why those strategies evolved. From one organism to comparisons across biodiversity. From individual forms to systems. From visual inspiration to scientific evidence. And finally from imitation towards abstraction. At that point the resulting design may no longer resemble nature at all. Yet it may contain something more important: an idea learned from the way life solved a problem.
Research Context
Learning from Nature forms part of Kerry Ferguson’s Science + Art Research Series and builds upon The Intelligence of Plants, Plants as Chemical Engineers, The Chemical Language of Plants, Colour Is Not Decoration and Nature’s Material Intelligence.
The essay examines the distinction between visual nature inspiration, functional biomimicry and emerging bio-informed design.
It places particular emphasis on plants as comparatively underexplored biological models and on the potential for evolutionary, comparative and place-based approaches to expand future biomimetic research.
The work also establishes a methodology for integrating scientific evidence with art and design without reducing biological systems to decorative motifs or assuming that nature-inspired designs are inherently sustainable.
Selected References
- Benyus, J.M. (1997). Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. William Morrow.
- Vincent, J.F.V., Bogatyreva, O.A., Bogatyrev, N.R., Bowyer, A. & Pahl, A.-K. (2006). Biomimetics: Its practice and theory. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 3, 471–482.
- Bhushan, B. (2009). Biomimetics: Lessons from nature—an overview. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 367, 1445–1486.
- Zhang, J., Baeckens, S., Van Damme, R. et al. (2025). Overlooked sources of inspiration in biomimetic research. Scientific Reports, 15, 25590.
- Harvey, C. et al. (2026). How bio-inspired is your design? A transparent reporting framework for bio-informed design. Communications Engineering.
- Stuart-Fox, D. et al. (2023). Challenges and opportunities for innovation in bioinformed sustainable materials. Communications Materials.
- Perricone, V. et al. (2024). The convergent design evolution of multiscale biological structures and bio-inspired materials. Communications Materials.
- Wegst, U.G.K., Bai, H., Saiz, E., Tomsia, A.P. & Ritchie, R.O. (2015). Bioinspired structural materials. Nature Materials, 14, 23–36.
- Meyers, M.A., McKittrick, J. & Chen, P.-Y. (2013). Structural biological materials: Critical mechanics-materials connections. Science, 339, 773–779.
- Fratzl, P. & Weinkamer, R. (2007). Nature’s hierarchical materials. Progress in Materials Science, 52, 1263–1334.
- Koch, K., Bhushan, B. & Barthlott, W. (2009). Multifunctional surface structures of plants. Progress in Materials Science, 54, 137–178.
- Barthlott, W. & Neinhuis, C. (1997). Purity of the sacred lotus, or escape from contamination in biological surfaces. Planta, 202, 1–8.
- Dawson, C., Vincent, J.F.V. & Rocca, A.-M. (1997). How pine cones open. Nature, 390, 668.
- Reyssat, E. & Mahadevan, L. (2009). Hygromorphs: From pine cones to biomimetic bilayers. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 6, 951–957.
- Prihar, A. et al. (2024). Tough double-bouligand architected concrete enabled by bio-inspired hierarchical design. Nature Communications.
- Aish, A. et al. (2025). Palaeo-bioinspiration draws on the fossil record to expand nature-inspired innovation. Communications Biology.
- ISO 18458:2015. Biomimetics — Terminology, concepts and methodology.
- Speck, T. & Speck, O. Research concerning biomimetics, plant biomechanics and transfer of biological principles into technology.
- Gebeshuber, I.C., Gruber, P. & Drack, M. Research concerning biomimetics in architecture, materials and design.
- Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge.