What is a skeleton?

Inside the Body

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by Kate Simmons >> more about the author

Stand or sit up straight and tall. Can you feel your backbone with your hands? What about your ribs—the bones that surround your heart and lungs? Now imagine that you have no bones. If this were true, your skin and organs would be a blob on the ground! You would not be as tall as you are, and your body parts would not be protected.

Thank goodness for your skeleton, which is made up of all the bones in your body. Your skeleton supports your body and protects its important parts, such as tissue and organs (like your brain, heart and kidneys).

Without your skeleton, you wouldn’t be able to move—your muscles attach to your bones with the help of tendons. If you had no bones, your muscles would have nothing to hold onto, making movement tricky at best!

Exercising can help keep your bones strong. So can eating and drinking foods rich in calcium, such as cheese, yogurt and milk!

Babies are born with more than 300 bones in their bodies. However, as a baby grows, some of these bones join or fuse together, and by the time he or she is an adult, there are 206 bones in the body. Now that’s some fancy fusing!

While people and many animals have their skeletons on the inside of their bodies, some critters, such as insects, have their skeletons on the outside. There are other creatures, such as earthworms and jellyfish, that have no skeleton!