1. The human hand has 27 bones; your face has 14! The longest bone in your body? Your thigh bone, the femur -- it's about 1/4 of your height. The smallest is the stirrup bone in the ear which can measure 1/10 of an inch. Did you know that humans and giraffes have the same number of bones in their necks? Giraffe neck vertebrae are just much, much longer! You have over 230 moveable and semi-moveable joints in your body.

2. Skull Anterior View After Completing All Answers -- Click Here for Correct Answers.Correct Answers Return to Biology 29 Home Page | Return to Skeletal Home PageBiology 29 Home PageSkeletal Home Page

7. You have over 30 facial muscles which create looks like surprise, happiness, sadness, and frowning. Eye muscles are the busiest muscles in the body. Scientists estimate they may move more than 100,000 times a day! The largest muscle in the body is the gluteus maximus muscle in the buttocks.

10. As an adult, you may have more than 20 square feet of skin -- about the size of a blanket. You are likely to shed some 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime. Right now there are over a million dust mites, microscopic critters invisible to the naked eye, on your mattress and pillow, chomping on the dead skin cells that fell off you last night!

12. Demodex folliculorum, lives in your pores and hair follicles, usually on the nose, forehead, cheek, and chin, and often in the roots of your eyelashes.

13. You can see three demodicids buried in the follicle of a hair, and you can also see the hair's shaft. If too many mites have buried into the same follicle, it may cause the eyelash to fall out easily. An individual female may lay up to 25 eggs in a single follicle.

14. The mites have tiny claws, and needlelike mouthparts for eating skin cells. However... did you know that you go to sleep at night on a pillow that is home to many thousands of dust mites...which help keep our homes clean by consuming the tens of millions of skin cells we shed each day? Just pretend they're not there!