There is a word that describes a single segment (not body part, each of the head, abdomen, and tail are made up of many segments) in an insect. The segment might be a leg, a wing, an antenna, a mouth part. It was a word one part of which was either reme or rame which was from the Latin word for oar. I read this somewhere and cannot recall where. Maybe somewhere in Steven Jay Gould.
Not “tagma”, is it?
…
The above link doesn’t work. Try this: tagma
Annulate: Formed in ring-like segments or with ring-like markings.
Antennomere: A segment of an antenna.
Urite: a segment or part of the abdomen in insects.
Another term is tergite.
And, I should have read the OP more clearly–you are thinking of “biramous,” which is a description for a limb with two branches, and you probably read it in a description of trilobite anatomy.
No, it was for insects and the word was Latin for oar. That’s all I remember, except that it was likely from Gould.
Sorry, but I’m right on this.
(Of course, you can slice off the “bi” and stick on a “uni.”)
That must be it. Thanks. Wonder what the noun is. Birame?
I remember the discussion of ‘biramous segments’ in Wonderful Life by Gould.
The term is a description, not a name: you could describe the human hand as five-fingered, but you don’t call the hand a “fivefing.” biramous just means that the limb starts off at the body as a single branch (or “oar”) and then splits into two branches (the “bi”) with one usually functioning as a gill and one for walking, swimming, etc. The biramous limb is the primitive character for arthropods, but through evolution one or the other brance can be lost, making it a uniramous limb. Insects, for example, have lost the gill branch on their walking legs.