• Question: I have heard that new born people have more bones than adults because they have not yet agglutilated. Is that true?

    Asked by Dr. Virag to Michael on 8 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Michael Rivera

      Michael Rivera answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Hi Dr. Virag!

      You’re right! Babies are born with around 300 bones, but many of them fuse together – and the typical adult person has 206 bones in total.

      Some of your leg and arm bones don’t fuse until you’re around 14 or 16 years old. In fact, this is how I can tell the age of someone sometimes in archaeology. If I dig up a leg bone and see that the ends are not fused to the middle section – this must mean that the person was younger than 14 or 16. When I combine them with maybe some teeth information (do you remember a time when your baby teeth were replaced with adult teeth?), I can get to the exact number.

      Your collarbones are usually the last bones in the skeleton to fuse – they can fuse anywhere between 20 and 30 years old. So if you get an injury to the collarbone as a child, you really do not want to get hurt near the joints… because this can cause problems later on in life at the joints!

      Michael 🙂

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