Anatomy and Physiology The Skeletal System --your skeleton is like inside framework.

Without bones you would flop like a beanbag, you wouldnt be able to move, and your organs and other body parts wouldnt be protected. Your backbone or spine, helps you stand. The spine makes a movable control rod, as well as a protector for your spinal cord. Bones and muscles are responsible for your movement. Without bones and skeletal muscle you couldnt move. Skeletal muscles connect to the bones and flex and contract to move your bones at joints. The hand has 19 movable jointsnot including the wrist bone. Bones protect important organs. Your skull in your head protects your brain and your eyes. The vertebra protects your spinal cord, and ribs protect your heart and lungs. Bones are rigid organs that constitute part of the endoskeleton of vertebrates. They support, and protect the various organs of the body, produce red and white blood cells and store minerals. Bone tissue is a type of dense connective tissue. Bones come in a variety of shapes and have a complex internal and external structure, are lightweight yet strong and hard, and serve multiple functions. One of the types of tissue that makes up bone is the mineralized osseous tissue, also called bone tissue, that gives it rigidity and a honeycomb-like three-dimensional internal structure. Other types of tissue found in bones include marrow, endosteum and periosteum, nerves, blood vessels and cartilage. At birth, there are over 270 bones in an infant human's body, but many of these fuse together as the child grows, leaving a total of 206 separate bones in an adult. The largest bone in the human body is the femur and the smallest bones are auditory ossicles. Bones have eleven main functions namely: Mechanical (for protection, structure, movement, and sound transduction); Synthetic for blood production; Metabolic (for mineral storage, growth factor, fat storage, acid-base balance, detoxification, and serving as an Endocrine organ). There are 5 main bone types in the human skeleton. Long bones, short bones, flat bones, irregular bones and sesamoid bones. A sixth type known as Wormian bones is also found, which are found during growth of the skull in children, these will not be discussed. The femur or thigh bone, is the most proximal (closest to the center of the body) bone of the leg in tetrapod vertebrates capable of walking or jumping, such as most land mammals, birds, many reptiles such as lizards, and amphibians such as frogs. In vertebrates with four legs such as dogs and horses, the femur is found only in the rear legs. The femur is the largest bone in the body. The head of the femur articulates with the acetabulum.

In human anatomy, the femur is the longest and largest bone in the body. The average adult male femur is 48 centimeters (18.9 in) in length and 2.8 cm (1.1 in) in diameter at the mid-shaft, and has the ability to support up to 30 times the weight of an adult. The femur forms part of the hip joint (at the acetabulum) and part of the knee joint, above which it is located. There are four eminences, or protuberances, in the human femur: the head, the greater trochanter, the lesser trochanter, and the lower extremity. They appear at various times from just before birth to about age 14. Initially, they are joined to the main body of the femur with cartilage, which gradually becomes ossified until the protuberances become an integral part of the femur bone, usually in early adulthood. The shaft of the femur is cylindrical and has a rough line, the linea aspera, on its posterior surface.The intercondylar fossa is present between the condyles at the distal end of the femur. In addition to the intercondylar eminence on the tibial plateau, there is both an anterior and posterior intercondylar fossa (area), the sites of anterior cruciate and posterior cruciate ligament attachment, respectively.