Your Body
Do babies have more bones than adults?
The short answer
Yes. A newborn has roughly 275 to 300 bones, while most adults have 206. Nothing goes missing. As a child grows, many small bones and pieces of soft cartilage fuse into single larger bones, so the count drops even as the skeleton gets bigger.
A newborn skeleton is a kit of parts. The skull alone arrives as several plates with soft gaps between them, the famous soft spots, so the head can squeeze through the birth canal and then keep growing. A baby's kneecaps are mostly cartilage and do not finish turning to bone for years.
Over childhood the pieces join. Plates in the skull knit together, the separate bits of the spine and pelvis fuse, and long bones like the thigh bone absorb the growth plates at each end once growing is done. By the early twenties the merging is finished and the standard count of 206 is reached.
So the bone you are reading this with is, in a sense, a renovation. You did not lose a hundred bones. You consolidated them.
Source
- How Many Bones Does a Baby Have?Cleveland Clinic