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Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Rotating locomotion in living systems/archive1

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A toy animal with wheels, from Pre-Columbian Mexico
Wheeled toy animal

Rotating locomotion in living systems includes both rolling of entire organisms, and the use of structures that propel by rotating relative to a fixed body, such as a wheel or propeller. Though the former mode is used by many types of organism, including pangolins and tumbleweeds, the latter is only known to occur in bacteria that use microscopic, corkscrew-like bacterial flagella. While other human technologies, like wings and lenses, have common analogues in the natural world, multicellular organisms have apparently never evolved rotating propulsive structures. Such structures may be infeasible to grow and maintain with biological processes. Compared with walking or running on limbs, wheeled propulsion is often less energy-efficient, less versatile, and less capable of traversing or avoiding obstacles in natural environments. This may explain why at least one historical civilization abandoned wheels, despite their utility in human vehicles. Rolling and wheeled creatures have appeared in speculative fiction and the legends of many cultures. (Full article...)

Comments and edits are welcome. - Dank (push to talk) 02:55, 18 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]