Bone

A bone is one of the hard pieces that make up the skeleton. A newborn baby has around 300 bones, many of them still partly cartilage. As the child grows, many of them fuse together, so an adult has 206.^[1] Everyone, therefore, loses about a hundred bones while growing up without misplacing any of them, which is more than can be said for socks.

Extremes

The longest and strongest bone in the body is the femur, the thigh bone. The smallest is the stapes, or stirrup, in the middle ear, about three millimetres long. It passes sound vibrations to the inner ear and is shaped, exactly, like a stirrup, which is the only time anatomists have named a bone after what it looked like and been completely right.^[2]

The hyoid bone, in the throat, is the only bone in the human body that is not connected to any other bone. It is held in place by muscles and ligaments and helps with swallowing and speech. It is the loner of the skeleton, and by most accounts it prefers it that way.

Hands and feet

More than half of the bones in the adult body are in the hands and feet: 27 in each hand and 26 in each foot. The rest of the body makes do with the remainder.

• Each hand: 27.
• Each foot: 26.
• Total in hands and feet: 106.
• Total in the rest of the body: 100, which is suspiciously neat.

See also

• Sock – things that are lost while growing up
• Staircase – a frequent test of bones
• White – the colour of most models of it

References

1. Fuse, F. (2001). Three Hundred to 206. Skeleton Press.
2. Stirrup, S. (1996). “Exactly Like a Stirrup”. Anatomical Names 3: 3.
3. Hyoid, H. (2009). On My Own. Throat Books.