Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Of or pertaining to the Malacostraca, Also
malacostracous . - noun A malacostracous crustacean.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Zoöl.) One of the Malacostraca.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun zoology Any of very many
crustaceans of the classMalacostraca
Etymologies
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Examples
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Thus Fritz Müller has made the remarkable discovery that certain shrimp-like crustaceans (allied to Penus) first appear under the simple nauplius-form, and after passing through two or more zoea-stages, and then through the mysis-stage, finally acquire their mature structure: now in the whole great malacostracan order, to which these crustaceans belong, no other member is as yet known to be first developed under the nauplius-form, though many appear as zoeas; nevertheless Müller assigns reasons for his belief, that if there had been no suppression of development, all these crustaceans would have appeared as nauplii.
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