Fractal life

This week's special issue of Current Biology, especially Nicholas Butterfield's article on the Neoproterozoic, got me thinking about my favorite pre-Cambrian life form, Charnia. This organism is believed to have developed according to rigidly recursive rules, and I thought it would be fun to play with a terrific Python plotting library, pyqtgraph, in this context. I started with the discussion of recursion in this book. This animate gif is the result:

I think the result is kind of pretty. The (somewhat sloppy) code that produced the images is here: