Flat Bone
Flat bones are those bones which are found where the principal requirement is either extensive protection or the provision of broad surfaces for muscular attachment. These bones are expanded into broad, flat plates, as in the cranium (skull), the ilium (pelvis), sternum, rib cage, the sacrum and the scapula. The flat bones are: the occipital, parietal, frontal, nasal, lacrimal, vomer, scapula, os coxæ (hip bone), sternum, and ribs. In the cranial bones, the layers of compact tissue are familiarly known as the tables of the skull; the outer one is thick and tough; the inner is thin, dense, and brittle, and hence is termed the vitreous table.
These bones are composed of two thin layers of compact bone enclosing between them a variable quantity of cancellous bone, which is the location of red bone marrow. In an adult, most red blood cells are formed in flat bones. The intervening cancellous tissue is called the diploë, and this, in certain regions of the skull, becomes absorbed so as to leave spaces filled with air (air-sinuses) between the two tables.
Read more about Flat Bone: Ossification in Flat Bones
Famous quotes containing the words flat and/or bone:
“I don’t like your miserable lonely single “front name.” It is so limited, so meagre; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)