A single sloughed-off or shed skin, shell, or outer covering of an animal, such as a snake's shed skin or insect's exoskeleton.
From Latin 'exuvia' (spoils, plunder, shed skins), originally meaning booty from war, then applied to animal shed coverings. The sense evolved from 'things cast off' to specifically biological castoffs.
This word's journey from 'war spoils' to 'snake skin' is wild—the Romans saw shed animal skins as a kind of plunder that creatures left behind, which is oddly poetic about what happens when animals molt.
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