Leo stared. The beetle’s entire body was encased in what looked like a suit of overlapping plates. The head was a helmet. The thorax (Grandfather pointed to the middle section) was a buckler. The shell over the abdomen was a polished cuirass. Even the antennae were beaded segments of rigid armor.
His grandfather, a man with hands like cracked leather and eyes that still sparkled with boyish wonder, looked up from his notebook. He saw the beetle on the leaf and saw the question on Leo’s face. is a beetle an arthropod
He took a clean sheet of paper and drew a simple diagram: a circle for a body, and lines sticking out that were broken into segments—like a ladder cut into pieces. Leo stared