• Question: How do adults have less bones than a baby ?

    Asked by sbannister09 to Alex, Jools, Lynz, Matt, Rika on 20 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Alex Davenport

      Alex Davenport answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      When babies are born their skulls are not fully formed. As they get older the different bones that make up the skull fuse together. So the bones arnt lost, they just fuse to creat one bone.

Comments

  • Photo: Anna

    Anna commented on :

    Hi sbannister09,
    This is a great question. I have given an answer to a similar question in the Forensic zone, and here’s the bit about determining age from a skeleton, which partly answers your question too:
    We determine age by looking at the development of the skeleton. Babies have lots of very soft bones that gradually fuse together and harden as they grow up. There are blobs of bone at the ends of each of the long bones (arms, legs) which fuse onto the main shaft of the bone at predictable times. For example, the knee joint properly fuses onto the thigh bone at about the age of 15, so if we find a skeleton where it is not fused, we can say that it was younger than 15, and if it is fused, that it is older than 15. Different joints fuse onto bones at different times, so if there are some fused and some not, then we can be more accurate with our estimation. We also use dental eruption, which happens at certain times, to predict age.
    Once someone’s skeleton has fully formed, than we look at degenerative changes, such as wearing of the joints of the pelvis and the sacrum. Also, as people get older, we can see things like arthritis in their bones, which indicates older age.
    I hope that helps!