This is a tutorial on the facial skeleton.
It's the second tutorial on the skull.
Hopefully, you've watched the first tutorial which was on the bones of the upper skull,
so the bones which house the brain and which I refer to as the calvaria, so all these bones
here.
This tutorial is on the rest of the skull, the lower and anterior part, which is called
the facial skeleton or the viscerocranium.
So if you just remember from the last tutorial, the skull consists of the upper part and the
lower part.
The mandible isn't actually considered part of the cranium.
So I'll do a separate a very, very short tutorial on the mandible, but this is just focusing
on the facial skeleton.
So there are several bones which make up the facial skeleton.
You've got the nasal bones, the maxilla, the zygomatic bone, the lacrimal bone on either
side.
Then you've got the vomer, the palatine bone and the inferior nasal conchae.
So I'm going to just talk you through those bones and hopefully, you'll have a good understanding
of those by the time I finish with this tutorial.
So just loads of things in anatomy, there's a mnemonic for remembering these bones and
that's 'Virgil cannot make my pet zebra laugh."
That's vomer, conchae, nasal bone, maxilla, mandible (which isn't technically part of
the facial skeleton, but anyway, it's included in this mnemonic), palatine, zygomatic and
lacrimal.
So I'll just talk you through those.
So you've got these nasal bones up here, which articulate with the frontal bone and the maxilla
on either side.
And where they meet the frontal bone and where they join together, this point here is known
as the nasion, which I've talked about in my tutorial on sutures.
So those are the nasal bones.
And here, you've got this bone here, the maxilla.
This, as you can see, makes up the medial part of the orbit as you can see here.
It's got a few processes.
So first, this is just something that basically just sticks out.
This process is called the frontal process because it articulates with the frontal bone.
And then you've got this process here, which is the zygomatic process of the maxilla because
it articulates with the zygomatic bone laterally.
And then this here is called the alveolar process because it articulates with the teeth.
So you've got the alveolar process, the zygomatic process and the frontal process.
And then you can probably see this little hole here.
You've got quite a lot of these tiny, little holes, these openings on the skull.
They are foramen.
Any little hole, a natural opening in the body, which allows structures to pass through
is known as a 'foramen' and the plural of 'foramen' is 'foramina'.
So you've got a lot of these on the skull because I think I'll do a separate tutorial
on them because you've got so many and they're quite important to know about and in particular,
know what structures pass through them.
So this one here is the infraorbital foramen and you've also got the supraorbital foramen,
which is part of the frontal bone.
You can't quite just about make it out.
It's more of a notch.
I think it's called the supraorbital notch.
They just allow the infraorbital and supraorbital vessels to pass through and nerves to pass
through.
So that's the maxilla bone.
Next, just moving around laterally, you've got the zygomatic bone.
This bone is the bone which is referred to as the cheek bone.
You can feel it on yourself.
It's the bone here which articulates with the temporal bone here, the frontal bone and
the maxilla.
So again, you can see the lower lateral orbit is made up of the zygomatic bone.
And again, you've got a little foramen here and I'll talk about these in another tutorial.
So this big hole here is called the piriform aperture.
That's obviously where the nose sits.
If I just show you the nasal cartilage, that's where the nose sits.
It opens to all the passageways of the nose.
It's quite important to just look at some of the structures through this piriform aperture.
So you can see this structure here.
I don't think I talked about it in my last tutorial, but this is the perpendicular plate
of the ethmoid bone.
It's called the 'perpendicular plate' because it drops perpendicularly down from the ethmoid
bone.
And then these structures that you can see from this anterior view on either side are
the concha or conchae in plural.
These are bony structures that make up the passageways of the nose.
This is the middle conchae.
You can't see the superior concha from this view.
The middle nasal concha makes up a part of the upper cranium.
They're part of the calvaria and not the facial skeleton.
This structure here is the inferior nasal concha.
So if we just zoom in, you can see that.
This long bone that extends posteriorly, this is the inferior nasal concha and it's part
of the maxilla bone.
You can see this is the maxilla bone and the inferior nasal concha is part of that.
So the inferior nasal concha is another bone of the viscerocranium.
It's like a little shelf that allows the passage of air into the nasal cavity and down into
the pharynx and ultimately, into the trachea and lungs.
You can see this little concave indentation, that's where the passageways for air run.
The passageway is known as the meatus and that extends into the posterior nasal cavity.
There's quite a lot to talk about with the conchae and the meatus and all the structures
of the nose, but I think I'll do that as a separate tutorial on the actual nose.
What you want to know here is that the inferior nasal concha is part of the maxilla and is
a bone of the facial skeleton and just that this is the perpendicular plate of the ethmoid
bone and these structures are middle nasal concha.
You've got superior nasal concha, which you can't see here and they're part of the upper
cranium.