• Question: How many bones are in the full human body

    Asked by anon-193363 to Morwenna, Jamal, iainstaniland, Heidi, Emma on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Iain Staniland

      Iain Staniland answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      To be honest I had a guess in my head at about 300 (I was wrong) so I looked it up and found out that like so many questions in science the answer is it depends!
      The popular answer is 206 but as usual it is more complicated than that as the number can change depending on what you mean by a “bone”, the age of the person (babies have more that fuse together) and some people just have more or less than others!
      I found this interesting discussion on it

      How many bones in the human body? It’s not what you think.

      they end by saying:
      best answer to the bone-count question is, “Nobody knows how many bones I have, and I am not going to expose myself to enough radiation to find out.”

      Thanks for your question. Again I have learnt something new today

    • Photo: Heidi Gardner

      Heidi Gardner answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Iain’s answer for this is brilliant – I had no idea so I googled it too. As Iain said, the popular answer is 206, but what I found interesting is that the number of bones in the human body gets smaller as we get older! At birth babies are thought to have about 270, but at they grow the bones fuse together, making the body stronger and leaving adults with about 206 bones.

    • Photo: Emma Crawford

      Emma Crawford answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Well Iain and Heidi have beat me to it here! I must admit I also had no idea as its been a while since I studied biology myself, but through the powers of Google I’ve found the same answers they both provided.

      In my search, I did stumble across a rather amusing video of a singing skeleton to teach you a bit more about the different bones in your body that I’ll share – enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUHh8uMdBso

Comments