20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek: Nemesis
6. The Scimitar Was Modelled After A Lionfish (For One Special Reason)
Say what you will about Nemesis, but Shinzon's ship the Scimitar sure is a unique and interesting vessel from a design perspective.
It's probably best remembered for the almost animalistic form it takes when deploying its cascading biogenic pulse weapon against the Enterprise at the end of the film.
As it turns out, the Scimitar's design was indeed inspired by an animal - a lionfish, which has distinctive venomous spines protruding from its body in much the same fashion as the Scimitar.
It gets even better, though: the lionfish wasn't something the ship's designers simply stumbled across, but served as a nod to the commonalities between Picard and Shinzon.
In The Next Generation, Picard had a lionfish in his ready room for many years, so it's rather poetically apt that his clone's vessel is modelled after it. That's surely no coincidence.