The word patagium entered English around 1826 to mean the flap of skin in flying mammals that allows them to glide. Since then, it has grown to include all flying animals, including lizards and mammals besides rodents, as well as the area of a bird’s wing from the shoulder to the wrist.
Patagium is also used to describe the skin forming the wing of a bat as well as the skin on extinct flying pterosaurs.
The word patagium is considered Neo-Latin-sometimes called New Latin or even Scientific Latin, when a word is appropriated virtually unchanged from a classical Latin form into a modern language. The Latin form comes phonetically straight from the Ancient Greek word patageion (παταγεῖον) which meant the gilded edge of a woman’s tunic, and in Latin grew to mean any gilded edge, as in the image below from the Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus.
Image of a Giant Flying Squirell courtesy Will Burrard-Lucas, all copyrights to Will Burrard-Lucas, used with permission. Extra special thank you to Mr. Burrard-Lucas for use of this spectacular image. Check out more of his images and his website here: http://www.burrard-lucas.com/
Film still from Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus showing John Gavin as Julius Caesar and Laurence Olivier as Marcus Licinius Crassus, both wearing tunics lined with patagium.
Image of a bat in flight courtesy Matt M., used with permission under a Creative Commons Share Alike Attribution 3.0 license.
