As an explicit example, winglets on airplanes were conceptualized from watching the way bird wings flap, observing the curl on the outer edge of the wing, discovering that it controls vortex formation, and then applying the same concepts to fixed wings.

That kind of thing happens all the time in aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, mechanics, etc — precisely because evolution is a pretty good optimization function, and so “natural” solutions can often be very close to optimal, but using hard-to-discover quirks of physics.