Facts about bones

Babies have more bones than adults.

Adults have 206 bones in their bodies, but the same is not true for infants.

The skeleton of a newborn baby has approximately 300 different components, which are a mixture of bones and cartilage. The cartilage eventually solidifies into bone in a process called ossification — for example, the kneecaps of newborns start off as cartilage and become bone in a few years.

Over time, the "extra" bones in infants fuse to form larger bones, reducing the overall number of bones to 206 by adulthood.

The hands and feet contain over half of the body's bones.

Bones come in all shapes and sizes, and are not evenly distributed throughout the body; some areas have far more bones than others. Coming out on top are your hands and feet.

Each hand has 27 bones, and each foot has 26, which means that together the body's two hands and two feet have 106 bones. That is, the hands and feet contain more than half of the bones in your entire body.

Some people have an extra rib that can cause health issues.

Most adults have 24 ribs (12 pairs), but about one in every 500 people has an extra rib, called a cervical rib. This rib, which grows from the base of the neck just above the collarbone, is not always fully formed — it's sometimes just a thin strand of tissue fibers.

Regardless of its form, the extra rib can cause health issues if it squashes nearby blood vessels or nerves. This results in a condition known as thoracic outlet syndrome, which is marked by pain in the shoulder or neck, loss of limb feeling, blood clots and other problems.

Every bone is connected to another bone — with one exception.

The hyoid is a horseshoe-shaped bone in the throat, situated between the chin and the thyroid cartilage. It's also the only bone in the human body not connected to another bone.

The hyoid is often considered the anatomical foundation of speech; because of where it's located, it can work with the larynx (voice box) and tongue to produce the range of human vocalizations. Neanderthals are the only other species to have hyoids like humans, and its presence in those hominids has led scientists to speculate that the Neanderthals had complex speech patterns similar to modern humans.