Anatomy Guide › Head & neck
Parietal Bone
Place a hand flat on the top of your head: almost everything under your palm is parietal bone. There are two of them, one per side, and together they form the roof and much of the side walls of the cranial vault. Each is a gently curved quadrilateral plate, and their smooth inner surfaces carry shallow grooves worn by the blood vessels that hug the brain's outer membrane.
The parietal bones are a study in sutures — the immovable joints that knit the skull together. They meet each other at the midline sagittal suture, meet the frontal bone in front at the coronal suture, the occipital bone behind at the lambdoid suture, and the temporal bones below at the squamous sutures. In infants, the soft spot toward the front of the head (the anterior fontanelle) sits exactly where the parietal and frontal bones will eventually converge, closing up as bone growth completes.
Clinically, the parietal region matters because the middle meningeal artery runs beneath the thin lower part of the neighboring temporal bone and sends branches under the parietal plates. A blow to the side of the head can tear those vessels and cause an epidural hematoma, one of the classic neurosurgical emergencies. That thinness is a reminder that the skull's strength varies a great deal from spot to spot.
In Anamo, the parietal bone rewards spatial thinking. If your skull guesses paint warm but not hot, remember that the parietal plates sit between nearly everything: frontal in front, occipital behind, temporal below. Their central position makes them one of the most useful 'triangulation' guesses in the head region.
- Paired bones forming the roof and upper sides of the skull
- Joined to each other along the midline sagittal suture
- The anterior fontanelle ('soft spot') of infants lies at their front corner
- Grooved internally by vessels serving the brain's outer membrane
Think you could find the parietal bone on a 3D model? Play Anamo and test yourself — every guess is color-coded by how close it lands to the mystery structure.