 All right, let's take a look at the vertebral column. We actually have, what is it, 33 or 34 total vertebrae. Let's just go with 30, shall we just commit and make it 34. And if you say 33, you'll get that right too. We have 34 total vertebrae. I'll show you where we have the variability. We have seven cervical vertebra, cervical. And these are closest to the neck. You have 12 thoracic vertebra, thoracic, thoracic vertebra. You have five lumbar vertebra. You actually will be able to tell the difference between your three different vertebra types. You have five sacral, sacral, seriously, sacral, yes, vertebra. These guys are fused. So you're going to see one thing that is the sacrum. I've got a sacrum around here somewhere. And then you're going to see four to five, right, yes. And then you have the coccygeal, coccygeal vertebra. And they're also known as the coccyx, coccyx, or the tailbone. And those are those little twangers down there. And they're kind of fused together into the coccyx. But they have different characteristics. They serve different functions. So they have different things that you're going to notice about them. Before we can compare our different types of vertebrae, we have to kind of have a quintessential vertebra and take a look at that and label the quintessential vertebra. Make sure we know our places. Ready? Let's do it. Every vertebra has a body. And it's this round part. Here comes the vertebra. There's a vertebra on a string here. And here is the round part. The round body of the vertebra, and if you think about this, if you feel your spine, you are actually feeling the spinous process. That's this thing right here. Spinous process. So is the spinous process anterior or posterior? It's posterior, which means the body is anterior. So your face is up this way in my little drawing and your tail, because I know you all have tails. That's somebody's tail. Let's make it wag, whatever. That is posterior by the spines. You have a hole. This is the vertebral foramen. Vertebral foramen. What goes through the vertebral foramen? Spinal cord, friends. That would be your spinal cord. Now, you also have transverse processes. Those are these guys. Transverse, does that make sense to you? Processes, they're sticking off to the side, kind of in a transverse direction. This is interesting. So here's the transverse process. Here's the spinous process. I'm going to draw a little line through a structure or a part of the vertebra known as the lamina. So let's label that. Lamina. Have you heard of a laminectomy? If you do a laminectomy, it's a surgical procedure where a surgeon will make a cut on both lamina on a vertebra. So if you make a cut down both lamina, you can actually take the spine of the vertebra and lift it off, and now you are spineless. Why would they do that? That gives you access to the spinal cord. You can actually look in and see the spinal cord traveling through the vertebral foramen. This is a vertebral disc. Now, what was that made out of? What kind of tissue is it made out of? Fibrocartilage. This is a place of grinding that takes place here. There are several places where we have joints in our spinal column, and if you look really carefully, you can actually see the places. There's two places where we can see it. You can see a joint here. You can also see it here. This is the same joint that I'm showing you. Now, this is, if I'm looking at this joint right here, you have a superior, articular process, and that is this guy. I'm going to make it in, we'll make it blue. This is the superior articular process. Look, here it is again. It's on this guy. Now, the superior articular process has a facet on it, and a facet is another name for a place where two bones articulate. So, the superior articular process is the place where you find the superior articular facet, and who does it form a joint with? The inferior articular process. I'm going to make that one purple, and that's right here. Look, that is my inferior articular process, and look, it's right here. Now, your inferior articular process from one vertebra to the superior articular process of the inferior vertebra, what? But if you think about it, take a deep breath and think about it, it makes perfect sense because we're talking about the inferior articular facet on this single vertebra. That single vertebra also has a superior articular facet on the top half of this vertebra, and that articulates with the inferior articular process of the next fella. Did you follow that? It makes sense. All of our bone conversations, I'm telling you right now, you need bones in your hands. So, you want to come in and get a bone box, come in on the weekend. This is a great time to come to Open Lab and get your hands on some bones so you can actually see it because it is challenging to do it from the two-dimensional pictures here. I did spinous process, transverse, yeah. Inter-vertebral foramina. What are those? Seriously? Seriously. Inter-vertebral between the vertebrae, foramina, space, really? Piece of cake, this is my inter-vertebral foramen. Inter-vertebral because it isn't a space when you look at a single vertebra. It doesn't even exist when you look at just one of them, but when you stack them all together, you'll see that there's spaces in there and your spinal nerves exit the spinal cord and travel out to your body through those spaces. Now, I think, oh man, I'm not positive. I don't think I have a picture of specific vertebrae. So let's look at, let's go back here and let's look at some specific characteristics that we're going to see in our different types of vertebrae. For one thing, cervical vertebrae, they're probably the most unique out of all of our friends. Our cervical vertebrae have something called the transverse foramina, or transverse foramin. Transverse foramina in their transverse processes. Okay, I can't help it, I'll show you one. It's just a vertebra, oh my gosh, there's stuff everywhere. You can see that, ah, ah, do you see them? Here's the body, here's the spine. There are holes in the transverse processes. That's weird, yeah, that's how you can identify the cervical vertebrae. It has these funky holes in the transverse processes. C7, they're numbered, our vertebrae are numbered. C7 is known as vertebra prominence. It has a big old spine, you can actually feel it on your back. And that's how you know you are at the last of the cervical vertebrae. You also have atlas, that's C1, and atlas is where the cranium sits. The occipital bone in your skull actually sits on C1 and there are articular processes there. And then you have C2, which is axis. And axis has an axis that sits straight up. So atlas comes and sits on top of that. And your skull sits on top of that. And so atlas can rotate around axis. And that's how you go, ah, ah, ah, ain't gonna do it. The thoracic vertebrae, this is interesting because the thoracic vertebrae are where ribs articulate. And I think when I talk about the ribs, I'll look at the thoracic vertebrae as well. And I'll try our specific parts on that based on our rib conversation in the next section. But there are actual facets or places, smooth places where the ribs articulate with thoracic vertebrae. And that's one of the ways that you know that you are in thoracic vertebrae. I'm gonna write them down. Costal facets and costal demi facets. And I will tell you the difference. Our lumbar vertebrae are like the quintessential vertebrae. They're just big. We'll make it red. They're big. They're beefy. They're solid. Which makes sense. They're holding a lot of your body. I do have a sacrum picture. We can look at the parts of the sacrum. We have the superior articular processes, and those are these things. And this is just where l5 articulates with the sacrum. We also have the sacral foramina. And those are these holes right here. So the sacrum, again, it's just a fused stack of five vertebrae. And those sacral foramina are the remnants of the inner vertebral foramina. I think that's everything. You know it is. All right. Now let's do the bony thorax, including the ribs.