Scales are a path breaking evolutionary adaptation that accompanied vertebrate evolution for the past 500 million years. Inherently lightweight with diverse shapes, sizes, materials, and distribution, they provide remarkable architecture-material enhancement, typical of metamaterials. Here we provide a perspective on mechanical behavior of fish scale inspired structures and explain the origins of some of their striking mechanical properties that include directional nonlinearity, interlocking behavior, and multiple penetration modes. We outline and explain the progress in understanding the complexities of these structures in global and local deformation modes and conclude by offering future perspectives and challenges.

鳞片是一种突破性的进化适应，在过去 5 亿年中伴随着脊椎动物的进化。它们本质上重量轻，具有不同的形状、尺寸、材料和分布，可提供显着的建筑材料增强，这是超材料的典型特征。在这里，我们提供了鱼鳞启发结构力学行为的一个视角，并解释了它们一些引人注目的力学性能的起源，包括方向非线性、互锁行为和多种穿透模式。我们概述并解释了在全球和局部变形模式下理解这些结构的复杂性方面的进展，并通过提供未来的观点和挑战来总结。