Half your bones are in the hands and feet
A typical adult skeleton has 206 bones. Fifty-four are in the hands and fifty-two in the feet, just over half the total.
Established2 min read
Each hand has 27 bones: eight carpals, five metacarpals, fourteen phalanges. Each foot has 26: seven tarsals, five metatarsals, fourteen phalanges. Two hands and two feet are 106 bones. The other hundred are skull, spine, ribs, and the long levers of the limbs.
The count is why a fracture inventory is so often a finger or a toe, and why the skeleton's complexity is concentrated at the ends. The femur is one bone. The wrist is a mosaic, and the mosaic is the point: many small joints, many small motions.
Caveats
- Sesamoid bones, and ordinary anatomical variants, change the total. Some people have extra toes' worth of small bones; some fusions remove a few. 206 is the textbook adult.
- Babies have more separate elements. They fuse. That is a different entry.
Sources
- 1Standring S. (ed.). Gray's Anatomy. Elsevier, 41st edition, 2016.