• Question: is it true that we only develop kneecaps at four to six years old?

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      Asked by jodlington to Kate, Kieren, Rowena, Roy on 19 Mar 2014.
      • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

        Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 19 Mar 2014:

        I don’t think so! Would be very bizarre if true… how would our knee joints work?!

        One thing that is true though is that you can tell the age of someone really well from looking at their knees! Hercule Poirot actually uses it to identify a woman pretending to be a school girl in an Agatha Christie book!

      • Photo: Kieren Bradley

        Kieren Bradley answered on 19 Mar 2014:

        I didn’t know the answer, so I looked it up in Wikipedia because I was interested, and it does appear to be true. We have cartilage the same shape as our knee bone at birth, and over the first 5 years of your life it slowly turns into bone.

      • Photo: Kate Nicholson

        Kate Nicholson answered on 19 Mar 2014:

        When we are born we have a lot more bones than an adult – about 300 which goes down to 206 as they fuse together. Also the bones are softer cartilage when we are a newborn, which then hardens (ossifies) into what you would class as bone. The kneecap (patella) is one example of a bone that starts as cartilage and hardens as we age, normally completely by the time we are 3 years old. It is also the biggest bone in the human body that is completely surrounded by muscle.

      • Photo: Roy Adkin

        Roy Adkin answered on 19 Mar 2014:

        I don’t know…but if they didn’t develop properly then I guess you’d need to go to the butchers…because that’s where they sell kid knees (kidneys). LOL…another one of my bad jokes.

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