Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Osteoderm
/ˈɒstiəˌdɜːrm/noun
A bony plate that forms within the skin of an animal rather than as part of the skeleton.
The Greek roots
ὀστέον
ostéon
bone
δέρμα
dérma
skin, hide
Literally: “bone skin”
The story of the word
The name is a precise description: bone grown inside the dermis, not attached to the frame beneath it. Crocodiles carry rows of them down the back, armadillos wear them as a shell, and the plates standing along a stegosaurus are the celebrity case. Because they sit in the skin rather than on the skeleton, they often fossilise scattered, well away from the animal that grew them.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
osteoporosisosteopathepidermistaxidermy
In a sentence
The quarry yielded a scatter of osteoderms and one crushed vertebra.
Run a hand along a crocodile's back and you are feeling osteoderms.