Anatomy Pop Quiz: What's the Longest Bone in the Human Body?

The truly remarkable human body has 216 bones, with an incredible range between large structural bones and tiny, delicate bones with specialized functions. So what are the largest (and longest) and smallest bones in the human body?

The largest bone is the thigh bone, the femur. It starts at your pelvis (hip bone), where it connects with a ball-and-socket joint to give your legs the remarkable range of motion, and runs down to your knees, where it connect to the larger of your two lower-leg bones, the tibia.

The smallest bone in the human body is the stirrup bone in your inner ear, which is part of the delicate mechanism that translates sound waves into signals that your brain recognizes as sound.

It really is amazing how all these different anatomical parts function. Unfortunately we usually don't realize how wondrous these parts are until something goes wrong with them.