What is "backboned"

Usage examples of "backboned".

Along with birds and bats, they had been one of only three groups of backboned animals to have mastered flight—and they had been the first.

The warrior brotherhood backboned the resistance in the reoccupied provinces.

Hali’s people, backboned by the shaghûn, stomped the eagerness out of them.

There was life in it, though not in the greatest abundance: thin strands of scalloped maroon seaweed, near-invisible jellyfish trailing their opalescent fringes, tiny dark skates hovering like bats, small silvery backboned fish gliding and darting—some of them, a blue-and-yellow-ringed and black-spotted school, even contesting lazily over the Black Treasurer's morning garbage, which the Mouser recognized by a large pallid beef bone Fafhrd had gnawed briefly before tossing overside.

Unlike the backboned structure of our world, whatever world it might have been.

Six legions overwhelmed by half-trained peasants scantily backboned by the leavings of shattered legions?

These were the first known backboned animals, the earliest fishes, the first known Vertebrata.