Definition of "vestige"
vestige
noun
plural vestiges
(by extension) A faint mark or visible sign left by something which is lost, or has perished, or is no longer present.
Quotations
Her face was without a vestige of colour, but it only showed more strongly the perfect outline of her features. Pale she was, but not like a statue; it was a human paleness—passionate and painful.
1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Letters Restored”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], page 218
(biology) A vestigial organ; a non-functional organ or body part that was once functional in an evolutionary ancestor.
Quotations
Any person seeing such a condition could not help being frightened at the conditions found, and it seems to me that that fact should lead us to think that the appendix is a vestige or becoming so.
1904, Transactions of the […] annual session, volume 40, Homeopathic Medical Society of the State of Pennsylvania, page 160
This idea was confirmed by Scott, who performed a detailed comparative analysis of primate anatomy and demonstrated conclusively that the appendix is derived for some unidentified function and is not a vestige.
2007, R. Randal Bollingera, Andrew S. Barbasa, Errol L. Busha, Shu S. Lina, William Parkera, “Biofilms in the large bowel suggest an apparent function of the human vermiform appendix,”, in Journal of Theoretical Biology