the.com/exoskeleton
Wearing your skeleton like a jacket so your organs never have to work out.
means A hard external covering that supports and protects an animal's body instead of an internal bony skeleton doing the job.
from Built from Greek pieces: 'exo' meaning outside, and 'skeletos' meaning dried up or desiccated — the same root that gives us 'skeleton.' The Greeks used skeletos to describe a dried-out body, and 19th-century scientists bolted 'exo' onto it to name the crunchy outer armor of insects, crabs, and the like — literally a 'dried-up body, worn outside.'
- material
- chitin, nature's cheap rigid plastic
- tradeoff
- must molt to grow, briefly defenseless
- size limit
- too heavy to scale past insect size
- bonus feature
- doubles as built-in armor