Babies Children Adolescents

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Fact: Babies don't have kneecaps.


Babies are born with pieces of cartilage that will eventually become the bony kneecap, or patella, that adults have. Like bone, cartilage gives structure where it's needed in the body, such as the nose, ears, and joints. But cartilage is softer and more flexible than bone.

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��Why do Babies have more Bones?




It may be difficult to imagine when looking at a tiny newborn baby, but that infant has around 300 bones and those bones are growing and changing shape every day. Adults, on the other hand, have 206 bones which make up about 15 percent of their body weight.

Wait, did we really just say that babies have nearly 100 more bones than adults? How is that possible? Well, even though bones appear to be tough and rigid, they're actually made up of living tissue and calcium that's always being built up and discarded throughout your life.

Babies have more bones than adults because as they grow up, some of the bones fuse together to form one bone. This is because babies have more cartilage than bone. New born babies have around 300 bones. A baby's skeleton is mostly made up of cartilage. As a person grows up, most of this cartilage turns into bone in a process called ossification. By adulthood, the skeleton has just 206 bones.

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