An unborn or unhatched vertebrate in the later stages of development showing the main recognizable features of the mature animal

Usage examples of foetus.

It performs the same function for the foetus that the lungs do for the organism after birth.

Early brain development in the foetus and newborn is itself associated first with a massive proliferation of cells, and then by a steady drop in number, but the space once occupied by the lost cells is taken up by an increase in the branching and synaptic connections made by those that remain.

Afterwards you may be ushered into a different room where hybrid babies or foetuses, partly human and partly like these creatures, stare back at you.

Why so many of us might be obsessing on foetuses or malnourished children, and imagining them attacking and sexually manipulating us, is an interesting question.

An epidemic of missing foetuses is something that would surely cause a stir among gynaecologists, midwives, obstetrical nurses, especially in an age of heightened feminist awareness.

I grant that the longings of women during their pregnancy have no influence whatever on the skin of the foetus, when I know the reverse to be the case?

Craig collapsed on his side, doubled up likea foetus, coughing and heaving the water from his lungs and shaking violently with cold.

After a day of such heat that tar dropped from the rigging and the pitch in the deck-seams bubbled under foot - perhaps the twentieth of such days in succession, with all the ship's boats towing astern to keep them watertight - Stephen left him down in his private lair, dissecting an eared seal's foetus, the pride of their largest jar of spirits.

You name it, and it spits it up some time or other: a dead man, a shell that might be alabaster, rose and pumpkin bright, with a sinistral whorling, rising inevitably to the tip of a horn as innocent as the unicorn's, a bottle with or without a note which you may or may not be able to read, a human foetus, a piece of very smooth wood with a nail hole in it--maybe a piece of the True Cross, I don't know--and white pebbles and dark pebbles, fishes, empty dories, yards of cable, coral, seaweed, and those are pearls that were his eyes.

The foetus, exerting itself, had become a baby, and the baby could only become a man by the proddings of a thousand new stimuli.

Here and there bobbed rusting tins and knots of fleshy tissue like tumours or aborted foetuses.