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The skin (integument) is a composite organ, made up of at least two major layers of tissue: the epidermis and the dermis. [2] The epidermis is the outermost layer, providing the initial barrier to the external environment. It is separated from the dermis by the basement membrane (basal lamina and reticular lamina).
Its purpose is to attach the skin to underlying bone and muscle as well as supplying it with blood vessels and nerves. It consists of loose connective tissue, adipose tissue and elastin. The main cell types are fibroblasts, macrophages and adipocytes (subcutaneous tissue contains 50% of body fat). Fat serves as padding and insulation for the body.
The function of these folds is to permit the circumference of the snake to increase, allowing prey to pass into the stomach during feeling. [10] Snakes differ from eels in the direction in which the skin is stiffer, the dorsal scale rows are more flexible in snake than in eels because the dorsal scale row associated with stretching. [ 10 ]
The word skin originally only referred to dressed and tanned animal hide and the usual word for human skin was hide. Skin is a borrowing from Old Norse skinn "animal hide, fur", ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *sek-, meaning "to cut" (probably a reference to the fact that in those times animal hide was commonly cut off to be used as garment).
The subcutaneous tissue (from Latin subcutaneous ' beneath the skin '), also called the hypodermis, hypoderm (from Greek ' beneath the skin '), subcutis, or superficial fascia, [2] is the lowermost layer of the integumentary system in vertebrates. [3]
Furthermore, areolar tissue is the same as loose connective tissue, adipose tissue is a subset of specialized connective tissue, and reticular tissue is the presence of reticular fibers and reticular cells together forming the stroma of hemopoietic tissue (specifically the red bone marrow) and lymphatic tissue organs (lymph nodes and spleen but ...
Osteoderms represent hard tissue components of the integument, making them easy to identify in fossil examination. [2] This dermal armor is found prominently in many lizards. Some early amphibians have this armor, but it is lost in modern species with the exception a ventral plate, called the gastralia .
The arthropod exoskeleton is divided into different functional units, each comprising a series of grouped segments; such a group is called a tagma, and the tagmata are adapted to different functions in a given arthropod body. For example, tagmata of insects include the head, which is a fused capsule, the thorax as nearly a fixed capsule, and ...