Lower Limb Skeleton Explorer
Turn the whole right lower limb in 3D, hip bone to toes, and see how much longer the thigh lever is than the foot it lands on.
Visualiser
Right lower limb, 31 bones
Checking this device for a stored copy.
Start here
- Isolate the fibula, then the tibia The difference in thickness is the division of labour: the tibia carries the load, the fibula carries almost none.
- Turn to Front and follow the femur from hip to knee It runs obliquely inward, yet the joint line at the knee is roughly horizontal, because the inner condyle reaches further down.
- Hide the Foot group Leaves the hip, thigh and shank, so the lengths of the levers are easy to compare.
Bone only. No cartilage, capsule, ligaments or menisci. For the hip that means you can see why it is stable, the ball sitting deep in its socket, but not what makes it move. BodyParts3D publishes no cruciates or menisci at all, so the knee here is bone only by necessity rather than choice.
- 31 bones
- 92k triangles
- 500 KB, on request
- 0.00741 mm worst error per axis
- 1 hip bone
- 2 thigh
- 2 lower leg
- 26 foot
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.
Latin terms for 11 of the 31 structures 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.
All 31 bones
Every structure the model contains, group by group. Each name opens the viewer with that structure selected, so a link can point at one bone rather than at the whole region.
Hip bone 1
- right hip bone os coxae, os innominatum
Thigh 2
- right femur femur, os femoris
- right patella patella
Lower leg 2
Foot 26
- right talus talus
- right calcaneus calcaneus, calcaneum, os calcis
- navicular bone of right foot os naviculare
- right cuboid bone os cuboideum
- right medial cuneiform bone
- right intermediate cuneiform bone
- right lateral cuneiform bone
- right first metatarsal bone os metatarsale I
- right second metatarsal bone os metatarsale II
- right third metatarsal bone
- right fourth metatarsal bone os metatarsale IV
- right fifth metatarsal bone os metatarsale V
- proximal phalanx of right big toe
- distal phalanx of right big toe
- proximal phalanx of right second toe
- middle phalanx of right second toe
- distal phalanx of right second toe
- proximal phalanx of right third toe
- middle phalanx of right third toe
- distal phalanx of right third toe
- proximal phalanx of right fourth toe
- middle phalanx of right fourth toe
- distal phalanx of right fourth toe
- proximal phalanx of right little toe
- middle phalanx of right little toe
- distal phalanx of right little toe
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.
Only some of these carry weight
Load runs from the hip bone through the femur, across the knee into the tibia, and from the tibia through the talus to the heel and the forefoot. The fibula is not in that chain. It exists for muscle attachment and to stabilise the ankle at its lower end, which is why it is so much thinner than the tibia beside it.
Built for load
- Hip bone
- A deep socket rather than a shallow one, which is the difference between a hip and a shoulder.
- Thigh
- The femur is the longest and strongest bone in the body, and it runs at an angle so that two widely set hips can meet two knees that are not.
- Lower leg and foot
- A thick column onto a short arched platform. The foot’s bones are packed tight, the opposite of the hand’s separate levers.
Common questions
Which bones in the leg actually carry weight?
Fewer than you would guess from looking at it. Load passes from the hip bone through the femur, across the knee to the tibia, and from the tibia into the talus and then the heel and the forefoot. The fibula carries almost none: it is there for muscle attachment and to stabilise the ankle at its lower end, which is why it is so much thinner than the tibia beside it. Isolate the fibula and then the tibia in turn and the difference in cross-section makes the division of labour obvious.
Why is the femur angled rather than vertical?
Because the hip joints are set wide apart and the knees are not, so each femur runs obliquely inward from hip to knee. The model shows the consequence: the joint line at the knee is roughly horizontal even though the shaft above it is not, which works because the medial femoral condyle extends further down than the lateral one to compensate. The inner compartment of the knee does carry more of the load and usually wears first, but the condyles are not the cause: at every step you stand briefly on one leg, and the line of the body’s weight then passes to the inner side of the knee, so the medial half is pressed harder than the lateral.
How does the lower limb compare with the upper?
Open both models and the contrast is the point. The lower limb is built for load and the upper for reach, and you can see it in the bones: the femur is the longest and strongest bone in the body, the tibia is a thick column, and the foot is a short arched platform with the bones packed tightly together. The upper limb trades all of that for range, with a shoulder blade held on by muscle alone and a hand of long separate levers. Same underlying plan, opposite priorities.
Is the hip joint itself visible?
The bony half of it is. You can see the socket in the hip bone and the ball at the top of the femur, and how deeply the one sits in the other, which is the difference between a hip and a shoulder. What is not here is the cartilage lining both surfaces, the ring of fibrous tissue that deepens the socket, or the capsule and ligaments around it, none of which BodyParts3D publishes. So this shows why a hip is stable and not what makes it move.