Plural of clipeus; plural form is rarely used in modern English, referring to round shield-like structures in anatomy or zoology.
Latin plural of 'clipeus' (round shield). These anatomical terms come from classical Roman terminology for shields, applied later to shield-shaped biological structures.
Clipei is almost never used anymore because modern scientists realized it's confusing to call something a 'little shield' in Latin when you could just say 'rounded plate'—but every biology textbook written before 1950 used these Latin plurals everywhere.
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