Mondo Knows Facts
A baby's skull has soft gaps between the plates
Six membranous fontanelles let the skull deform during birth and grow afterwards At birth the skull bones are separate plates joined by fibrous seams. The largest gap, the anterior fontanelle on top of the head, usually closes by about eighteen months. The gaps allow the head to pass through the birth canal and give the brain room to expand. It sits in Mondo's human body collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: skull, infants, bones
A baby's skull has soft gaps between the plates: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Six membranous fontanelles let the skull deform during birth and grow afterwards. The figure is taken from MedlinePlus, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a human body fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Human Body shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.