 Okay, so we've thought about connective tissues in general now. Our next goal is to become familiar with some of the different kinds of connective tissue. We just want to take a few minutes and look at the different kinds of connective tissues collectively and then we'll look at each one in more detail and talk about the structure and its function. So now we're just going to do sort of a quick overview so you can see them all together in one place before we move forward and get into all the details. So types of connective tissue, I've listed some of the connective tissues that you need to know and I've listed them in an order that sort of makes sense to me as I try to remember them and so I'll explain that to you and maybe that will help you. I always start out with loose connective tissue. Sometimes it's called areola or connective tissue. Loose connective tissue is exactly what it sounds like it is. It's a connective tissue that's very loosely put together. In other words, there's a lot of space between the cells, there's a lot of space between the fibers. Loose connective tissue has a liquid ground substance. Loose connective tissue is found in many places throughout the body. It's found under the skin, for example. It's found between muscles. As one muscle is touching another muscle, they need to be able to slide across one another and so we find loose connective tissue there. We find loose connective tissue just deep to the epithelial tissue lining your alimentary canal and there are a lot of blood vessels that move through loose connective tissue and nerves and so that's a good place to have this loosely structured tissue. So loose connective tissue. A sharp contrast to loose connective tissue is dense connective tissue or fibrous connective tissue and it's exactly what it sounds like it is. Fibrous connective tissue is made out of a lot of really tough, collagenous fibers or sometimes it's called dense connective tissue because it's densely packed together. You know about dense connective tissue if you've ever gotten a chicken McNugget that contains what my grandmother would call grizzle. That's dense connective tissue and you know how tough that is. Adipose tissue is something that we find in animals and it's also called fat tissue. Adipose tissue stores fat and it can be very useful. Adipose tissues involved with cushioning, protecting, insulating in a face-to-face class I often ask students to name animals that have a lot of adipose tissue and the number one answer is usually a well and they're somebody will say bear or walrus and if you think about those animals they have a lot of adipose tissue to help insulate them against the cold. I think most people are familiar with bone tissue. You know you have bones in your body and they're very rigid. They have some flexibility but certainly your bones can break and many of you may have broken bones at some point in the past. Blood is an important type of connective tissue and most people are familiar with blood. It's something that you don't want to lose. If you spring a leak you want to stop that very quickly and so blood in contrast to bone is liquid, it's not a solid. We also have cartilage and there are three different kinds of cartilage that you need to know about. One is called hyaline cartilage, then there's one called elastic cartilage and one called fibrocartilage. Hyaline cartilage is very common, it's found in your trachea, if you palpitate your throat and you can fill the rings in your trachea or your windpipe, it's also found at the end of your nose. Elastic cartilage is just what it sounds like it is. It's cartilage that can stretch, it has a lot of elastic fibers. If you take your ears and pull on them really hard and let go they're going to spring back and your ears contain elastic cartilage. And finally we have fibrocartilage which is what it sounds like it is. It's cartilage that has a lot of fibrous connective tissue or fibers in there made out of collagen. And this fibrocartilage is extremely tough. It's able to take a lot of stress and a lot of shock and we find this in places like your knees and in the intervertebral disc. These are the connective tissues that you need to be familiar with and in the next segment we're going to look at each of these tissues and talk about their structure and function in more detail.