pennibrachium
pennibrachium noun: a forelimb, found on various species of extinct and extant coelurosaur, that is not used in flight or gliding but still bears long, typically pennaceous feathers which form a winglike surface.
Noun
pennibrachium (plural pennibrachia)
- A forelimb, found on various species of extinct and extant coelurosaur, that is not used in flight or gliding but still bears long, typically pennaceous feathers which form a winglike surface.
- Some dromaeosaurid, troodontid, oviraptorosaur and therizinosaur specimens show the presence of what we term a ‘pennibrachium’, a forelimb bearing long feathers that form a planar, wing-like surface but are not necessarily used in aerial locomotion.2010 July 7, Corwin Sullivan, “The asymmetry of the carpal joint and the evolution of wing folding in maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs”, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences...
Forms of pennibrachium
| plural | pennibrachia |
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Origin of pennibrachium
From Latin penna (“feather”) + brachium (“arm”). Coined by Sullivan et al. in 2010.
Questions about pennibrachium
- What does pennibrachium mean?
- Pennibrachium means a forelimb, found on various species of extinct and extant coelurosaur, that is not used in flight or gliding but still bears long, typically pennaceous feathers which form a winglike surface.
- What part of speech is pennibrachium?
- Pennibrachium is a noun.
- What is the plural of pennibrachium?
- The plural of pennibrachium is pennibrachia.
Words near pennibrachium in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pennibrachium (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “pennibrachium.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pennibrachium. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.