Lower Limb Explorer
The right leg’s bones with the lower limb muscles over them, hip to toe: 157 structures in compartments you can glass, hide and label.
Visualiser
Right lower limb, 31 bones
Checking this device for a stored copy.
Start here
- Press Show all Brings back the 63 left-leg structures, which start hidden because the skeleton here is the right limb only.
- Filter to Muscle and collapse the bone model Leaves the right leg’s muscles in their compartments. Expand the bone again to see what each compartment crosses.
- Open the Foot band under Lower limb muscles The intrinsic foot muscles, 20 a side. Label selects the 20 on the side this page shows, and a saved figure names every one. With both sides showing it takes the first 24 of the 40, which is the most a figure can carry.
Bone and muscle, right side. No nerves and no vessels in the limb. The lumbosacral plexus is not segmented, and the vessel model stops at the internal and external iliacs, so nothing in the thigh or below is published. The dataset’s only nerves anywhere are the optic nerves, with their chiasm and tracts, so there is nothing to switch on rather than something withheld.
Where this comes from
Segmented from imaging of one adult male body, not drawn by an artist, so the shapes are measurements. Two consequences worth knowing: it is one person’s anatomy rather than an average, and faint stepping on some surfaces is the resolution of the original scan rather than a rendering fault.
Meshes from BodyParts3D, © The Database Center for Life Science, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Names and identifiers are the dataset’s own: Foundational Model of Anatomy identifiers and English labels, as its parts list gives them. Converted meshes are shared under the same licence.
Changes made: Meshes were converted from binary STL to an indexed mesh with 16-bit quantised vertex positions, and surface normals were recomputed from the geometry. No vertex was moved other than by that quantisation, whose worst-case error on any one coordinate is reported on the page. On this page it is at most 0.00849 mm, the largest among the 4 models the page can load.
Latin terms for 97 of the 157 structures in these models come from English Wikipedia anatomy infoboxes, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, joined by Wikidata property P1402, Foundational Model of Anatomy identifier. Only a term a source states for that structure is used, never one constructed from a family name, which is why the rest carry no Latin rather than a guess.
Citing this tool
Last updated . Add the date you accessed it as well, which a citation of a page that can change asks for. If a specific view matters, cite the page address as it stands in your browser instead: it records what is selected and shown.
One leg of bone, two legs of muscle
The bone model used here covers the right lower limb only, while the muscle model covers both legs. This page keeps the right of each and hides the left 63, so what you see is one leg. Press Show all to get the other set back. Nothing is thrown away and nothing is re-encoded: the hidden structures are in the list, in the count and in any link you share.
The side is measured rather than read off the label, from the sign of each structure’s centroid across the body. Anything within 12 millimetres of the midline is called midline and is never hidden, which matters because three structures in the whole dataset disagree with their own label, all of them within 10 millimetres of the centre. The left common iliac vein genuinely crosses the midline, passing behind the right common iliac artery on its way to the vena cava. The two brachia of the superior colliculi do not: each runs on its own side, from the superior colliculus to the lateral geniculate body, and the model has their two labels swapped. In the limb muscle assets the most medial structure sits 23.7 millimetres out, so none of them can be mistaken for a midline structure.
Common questions
Why does the page say it is showing 94 of 157 structures?
Because it has hidden the left leg’s muscles and says so rather than leaving a gap in the count. The bone model used here covers the right lower limb only, while the muscle model covers both legs, so without this the scene is a right leg of bone next to a left leg made only of muscle. The 63 hidden structures are still in the list, still in the count and still in any permalink, and Show all restores them in one press if what you want is to compare the sides.
Is the side measured or read off the name?
Measured. Each structure’s centroid comes from its geometry and the sign of its across-body coordinate gives the side, because testing the label for left or right is the pattern matching that once dropped a bone from a published count. The two were checked against each other before this was relied on: 608 labelled structures across every bone and muscle asset, no disagreement. Anything within 12 millimetres of the midline is called midline and never hidden, and the most medial limb muscle sits 23.7 millimetres out, so none is caught by accident.
What does this show that the separate leg pages do not?
Which compartment a muscle belongs to and what it crosses. The muscles arrive already grouped as anterior, medial and posterior thigh, anterior, lateral and posterior leg, and the intrinsic foot muscles, so filtering to muscle and collapsing the bone gives you the compartments on their own. Expanding the bone again shows which joints each one spans, which is the fact that decides what it does, and it is the thing a page with only bone or only muscle leaves to the imagination.
Can I export the intrinsic foot muscles as a labelled figure?
Yes, one side at a time, which is how this page shows them. The foot band holds forty muscle meshes, twenty a side, and the left twenty start hidden, so pressing Label selects the twenty on the right and a saved figure names every one. With both sides showing it selects the first twenty-four and tells you it has done so, because a labelled figure carries twenty-four at most: past that the leader lines cannot be placed without overlapping and the figure stops being readable. For all forty the structure list is the better tool, and it is the accessible one: it names every muscle as text.