squamous /SKWAY-məs/ & squamulose /SKWAY-myə-ləs/. adjective. Covered with scales; scaly. Composed of scales or a resemblance of scales. In anatomy, the thin scaly part of the temporal bone. In medicine, a suture with thin overlapping parts resembling scales. From Latin squama (scale); possibly related to squalus (filthy, foul), from which squalid and squalor are derived.
“There was Littleface, whose actual features occupied a tiny square in the centre of a squamous, bloated head.” (Robert Stone)
“…to make a sordid story as squamous as possible, the network head bought, for his schedule, a handful of shows produced by the ex-actor…” (Harlan Ellison)
“She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality.” (Ursula K. Le Guin)
“It was a raptor perch, well used. Buzzard or eagle or both. There were big black and white turds, and dozens of excreted bird and animal bones. It had a miniature forest of lichens, foliose and squamulose.” (Robert Macfarlane)
“Every little breeze seems to whisper squamous carcinoma.” (Chuck Palahniuk)
“The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind…” (Wallace Stevens)
“…of fires flitting like flaming bats through the shadowy skies; of things that haunted midnight forests, crawling, squamous things that were never seen, but which tracked men down in the dank depths.” (Robert Howard)
“…while vibrancy still speckles the iris, while beds go unmade and floors function as hampers and we know all the songs on the radio and our skin is not squamous from the aging of cells, and we do not lurch down the hallways of rest homes, before ducks in neat rows and the long gloam of August…” (David Shields & Matthew Vollmer)
“…he took hold of that same Rowdy Dick by pantleg and armpit and swung him, oh wrathful lambs, against the abutment where the poem was inscribed, swung him as a battering ram might be swung, and cracked Rowdy Dick’s skull from left parietal to the squamous area of the occipital, rendering him bloody, insensible, leaking, and instantly dead.” (William Kennedy)
“It is dry, on the center finely tomentose to minutely squamulose, sometimes the scales splitting up into concentric rows around the cap.” (George Francis Atkinson)