There’s a radio ad for a hospital running in my parts, where the narrator says, “When I was 6 years old, I broke my leg. That was back when I had 275 bones. I have 206 bones now (as an adult).”
Anyone care to explain?
I know that, for example, a baby’s skull consists of floating bones that fuse later, but losing 69 bones as you grow sure seems like an awful lot.
I guess my question could be further broken down to this: Are all of these lost bones involving the skull? What other parts of the body have bones that fuse together as we age?
Just a WAG, but the hands and feet have alot of small bones. Maybe some of them fuse together.
And of course there’s the bone that most men lose if they get old enough…
All I can find is that children have 270 soft bones, some of which fuse and become the 206 hard bones of an adult at about age 20-25.
All I could definately find was that the coccyx (4), sacrum (5?), sternum (3), and pelvis (3) fuse to form one bone each. That only accounts for 11 missing.
Sheesh, Johnny, if you’re gonna quote the one and only Allan, you oughta do him the service of looking up (or memorizing, in my case) the lyrics. Ahem:
*The doctor was looking at my X-ray
And I asked him “What do you see?”
And he kept on looking at the X-ray
As he said
In French
Toooooo meeeeee…
I see bones
I see gizzards and bones
And a few kidney stones
Among the lovely bones!
I see your hips
And asparagus tips
And fourteen paper clips
Among the lovely bones!
There are things
In your per-
Iteneum
That belong
In the British
Museum!
I see your spine
And your spine looks divine
It’s exactly like mine
Now doesn’t that seem strange?
And just in case
You use pay telephones
There’s two dollars in change
Among the lovely bones!*
(a spoken riff about M&Ms “Those folks are right - they don’t melt!” and a 1992 McKinley blue postage stamp follows)
teeth aren’t bones, are they? I thought their chemical structure was quite different. (and in any event, you have more teeth as an adult than as a child, so that can’t be the cause of a net loss of bones, can it?)