One way to generalize a right prism is to shrink one or more of the sides of the polygons or to a point. This is called a prismatoid. In this Demonstration, the original polygon is a hexagon and one of the sides of the base is shrunk to a point so that the base becomes a pentagon.

A scutoid is a recently defined [1, 2] modification of such a prismatoid in which the two converging edges are replaced by a Y-shaped intersection.

Scutoids were first identified and named by P. Gómez-Gálvez and coworkers in their study of the three-dimensional packing of epithelial cells [3]. Networks of scutoids are suggested as possible structures for biological membranes since they can maintain curved yet rigid configurations.