  Fractal curvatures of a subset F of R^d are roughly defined as suitably
rescaled limits of the total curvatures of its parallel sets F_e as e tends to
0 and have been studied in the last years in particular for self-similar and
self-conformal sets. This previous work was focussed on establishing the
existence of (averaged) fractal curvatures and related fractal curvature
measures in the generic case when the k-th curvature measure C_k(F_e,.) scales
like e^(k-D), where D ist the Minkowski dimension of F. In the present paper we
study the nongeneric situation when the scaling exponents do not coincide with
the dimension. We demonstrate that the possibilities for nongeneric behaviour
are rather limited and introduce the notion of local flatness, which allows a
geometric characterization of nongenericy in R and R^2. We expect local
flatness to be characteristic also in higher dimensions.
  The results enlighten the geometric meaning of the scaling exponents.
