Mandible (1) – The mandible is the jawbone.

I’ll cover those single facial bones first: There are fourteen facial bones, and all of them are pairs of bones except for two. Here’s a quick cranial bones mnemonic to help you remember them (from front to back, with the first two letters corresponding to the bone names): Ethan’s Fried Spanish Pasta Tempted Octavia. But it makes perfect sense to me, because I also happen to have eyes on the back of my head (bwahahaha). It doesn’t make sense to a lot of people that our eyes are in the front of your head, yet the part of the brain that processes visual images is located in the back of the head.

Occipital bone (1) – The word occipital literally means “back of the head.” It covers the occipital lobe of the brain, which processes visual images.

That’s how I remember this one: The ethmoid is the “enclosed” cranial bone. However, it is mostly enclosed or encased within the skull. When looking at the skull from the anterior view, you can see a part of it in the openings of the eye sockets and nasal cavity. It’s located inferior to the frontal bone and between the sphenoid and nasal bones.

Ethmoid bone (1) – “Ethmoid” comes from a word that means “sieve” or “strainer.” That’s because the top of this bone has something called cribriform plates that contains tiny holes, resembling a strainer.

However, the sphenoid is one large bone spans the cranium! That’s how you can remember this cranial bone: the sphenoid is the specter that spans the cranium! Don’t be fooled by the lateral skull view, because it appears as though the sphenoid is another pair of bones, just like the temporal and parietal bones. Many people think that it looks like a butterfly or bat, but it also looks like a specter (ghost).

Sphenoid bone (1) – This butterfly-shaped bone articulates with all of the cranial bones and spans the entire width of the cranium, which you can see when you look at an inferior view of the skull.

(Aren’t those anatomists so clever!) Forehead and frontal both start with an “F,” so this is probably the easiest cranial bone to remember. Guess what it’s called? It’s called the frontal bone. It makes up the FRONT of your cranium and also covers the frontal lobe of your brain. Frontal bone (1) – Look at your forehead.All the rest of the cranial bones are single and ready to mingle:

We already have four of the eight cranial bones, so we’re halfway there. Guess what those paired bones are called? They’re called temporal bones! They are located just inferior (lower) to the parietal bones. Temporal bones (2) – If you get a headache from studying anatomy, you might want to massage the sides of your temples to relieve the pressure.As I mentioned in my video on body cavities and membranes, the word parietal means wall, and these bones make up the walls on the side of the cranium. The word parietal sounds similar to “pair,” so that can help you remember that there are two of them. Parietal bones (2) – The first pair of bones in the cranium are the parietal bones.I’ll cover the eight cranial bones first, starting with the two pairs of bones. The facial bones are the complete opposite: you have two single bones, and the rest are pairs! Here’s a cool thing to remember about the skull bones: in the cranium, two bones come in pairs, but all the others are single bones. The 22 skull bones make up part of the axial skeleton, and they can be divided into two main sections: the 8 cranial bones, and the 14 facial bones.

Craniofacial skeleton sketch