5 amazing facts about skeletal system

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 new born 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 new borns 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.
4. Bones are not the hardest substances in the body.
 Bones are strong and rigid, and built to withstand a lot of force — pound for
pound, they are stronger than steel. But, surprisingly, they are not the
hardest substance in the body.

 That title goes to another part of the skeletal system: tooth enamel. This
substance protects the crown of teeth and owes its strength to its high
concentration of minerals (calcium salts in particular), according to the
National Institutes of Health.

5. People don't directly control their bones.

 One of the staples of Halloween costumes and horror movies is the walking
skeleton. Of course, such a creature is pure fiction because it has no brain
or nervous system to control its movements. But even if it did have these
vital components, the undead monster would still be unable to walk around.

 When people move their arms, legs or any other part of their bodies, it's not
because they tell their bones to move — it's because they tell their muscles,
which are attached to their bones, to move.