Scientists Discover a New Shape

The Scutoid

First off, I didn’t even know that anyone was looking for new shapes. I guess I’m glad that research in the field of spacial geometry is still being conducted. I, for one, thought everything that there was to know about geometric shapes had already been discovered decades ago. Now, the rhombus has to move aside like Pluto as it relinquishes its position as the least understood geometric figure, making room for the "scutoid."

Scientists from the University of Seville discovered the new form in nature. The results were published in the peer-reviewed journal, Nature Communications. The new shape was described as having a specific curve and didn’t look like any known mathematical figure. The researchers observed the structure in fruit flies and zebrafish. While the rest of us were filing off to our boring, mundane jobs, scientists were pushing the envelope of knowledge by looking for undiscovered shapes in insects and fish.

The scutoid, named for a structure found in the thorax of beetles, is five sided on one end and six sided on the other. It’s basically a hexagon and a pentagon smashed together. Euclid described many of the basic shapes like the circle in his seminal work, Elements, a 13 volume treatise written in 300 BC. The circle is believed to be known before recorded history because it’s so common. The moon, the wheel, coins. Other shapes like the parallelogram and rhombus are harder to find in nature. It’s no wonder it took scientists so many years to find the elusive scutoid because who would have thought to look between the neck and abdomen of a bug?

There are a lot of complex shapes which one might be unfamiliar with like the frustum, which is the lower part of a pyramid, or the rhombicosidodecahedron which has 20 triangular faces, 30 square faces, 12 regular pentagonal faces, 60 vertices, and 120 edges. Many of these shapes are found in the natural world, the cosmos, microbiology and the ass of a goat. Now that the scutoid has been discovered, scientists are pretty sure there are no more new shapes out there. How do they know? Because the only place scientists haven't searched is a stink beetle's colon.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on August 7, 2018.