Tegmen

This article is about an insect's wing. For the inner coat of plant seeds, see Seed coat. For the star system of this name, see Zeta Cancri.
Left tegmen of male Blatta orientalis
Lithoblatta lithophila, a Jurassic fossil, some 200 million years more recent than the emergence of cockroaches in the Carboniferous. Even the earliest cockroaches had tegmina that fossilised well.

A tegmen (pl.: tegmina) designates the modified leathery front wing on an insect particularly in the orders Dermaptera (earwigs), Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets and similar families), Mantodea (praying mantis), Phasmatodea (stick and leaf insects) and Blattodea (cockroaches).[1]

It is also a term used in botany to describe the delicate inner protective layer of a seed,[2] and in zoology to describe a stiff membrane on the upper surface of the crown of a crinoid.[3]

In vertebrate anatomy it denotes a plate of thin bone forming the roof of the middle ear.[2]

  1. ^ Richards, O. W.; Davies, R.G. (1977). Imms' General Textbook of Entomology: Volume 1: Structure, Physiology and Development Volume 2: Classification and Biology. Berlin: Springer. ISBN 0-412-61390-5.
  2. ^ a b "tegmen | Definition of tegmen in English by Oxford Dictionaries". Oxford Dictionaries | English. Archived from the original on November 13, 2018. Retrieved 2018-11-12.
  3. ^ O'Hara, Timothy; Byrne, Maria (2017). Australian Echinoderms: Biology, Ecology and Evolution. Csiro Publishing. p. 171. ISBN 978-1-4863-0763-0.