Healthbolt

Useless Body Part: Coccyx

by Wade Meredith on June 18th, 2007

Most mammals have a tail. We do not. What we do have is the table scraps of evolution’s ongoing charge at the buffet of life. Evolution is a messy business. Basically, it’s a string of accidents that occasionally work out for the better and a re retained. This leaves us with all kinds of interesting things in our body that could be considered dead weight or lame-duck body parts. Someday they may disappear for good, but today is not that day. Which brings us to the partial tail you have…

Your Coccyx (aka tailbone) is connected to the hip bone. This widely variable wonder is usually composed of 3 to 5 vertebrae fused together. I say highly variable, because sometimes people don’t even have them, and sometimes babies are born with tails.

In fact, we all start out with a tail, in utero. At that time, it comprises about 1/6th of our entire body length. It is absorbed as we mature. But in rare cases it is not, and human children are born with a “soft tail”. No bones, just muscles and nerve tissue. Modern surgeon’s are able to eliminate these with a standard procedure. The longest human tail ever recorded was 9″ and belonged to a twelve-year old boy in French Indonesia.

For most of us, these fused vertebrae are there, but not externally visible. They are all that’s left of the tails most mammals use for balance and stability. We lost our need for tails before we began walking upright.

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POSTED IN: Your Body