Abstract:Many physical and biological systems are constituted by dense, disordered arrangements of individual units. A broad class of these systems exhibit hyperuniform behavior, whereby density fluctuations are suppressed at large spatial scales. Here, we find that the arrangement of chromatophores on squid skin behaves in an opposite manner, such that density fluctuations grow with spatial scale, akin to a critical system. We term this behavior `hyperdisordered'. We combine experiments and theory to reveal how this unexpected scaling is due to the interplay between growth and volume exclusion. The ubiquity of these two features implies that the simple mechanism we describe may apply to a broad class of growing systems.