Squares, triangles, rectangles—you'd think the list of shapes we have names for is pretty well settled by this point. Not so fast: behold the "scutoid."

The craggy, quasi-cylindrical construction may sound alien, but the scutoid is actually found about as close to home as you can get: in your skin. In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists from the University of Seville in Spain, Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and several other research institutions concluded that the type of cells responsible for forming skin and the lining of an organism's organs will morph into scutoids in order to accommodate those organs' complex curvature.

In a statement by one of the authors, Luis M. Escudero of the University of Seville compared these cells—called "epithelial cells"—and the shapes they form to Lego blocks. Scutoids are the perfect shape for fitting the cells together tightly and efficiently, and can act as a shield against infection.