I have an free app on my i pod touch that generates fractals in response to tilting movements as well as by touch. A while ago before biologists actually knew how development worked they came up with all sorts of elegant mathematical models of how they wished development worked. It turns out that actually the whole thing is a very complicated mess with important things happening both upstream and down stream of genes that everything is made of modified and transposed modules and such.
But now lets look at a beautiful developmental fractal.
If you look at this "Romanesco variety" Cauliflower bud. It is a bud with smaller buds running up the side in a spiral which in turn are made of spiral buds and so on. It's buds all the way down. Unlike other aspects of development this phenotype is just the sort of thing you could give to a computer graphics generator and display.
What is really curious is that the whole cabbage brassica alliance was artificially selected from the wild mustard plant. Too bad developmental biologists don't care about plants because heres a case where this pattern could be investigated with many know sister taxa groups that could can find in the supermarket.
I agree that Romansco cauliflower is beautiful (and tasty!). The fabulous spirals arise due to maximising packing, which results in spirals having ratios of successive Fibonacci numbers (13 and 21 in this case). I don't think that there is much to learn about development, though, from this type of organization, save that it sometimes follows simple rules that can give the appearance of complexity.