knee joint

The knee joint joins the thigh with the leg and consists of two articulations: one between the femur and tibia, and one between the femur and patella. It is the largest and most complicated joint in the human body. The knee is a mobile trocho-ginglymus (i.e. a pivotal hinge joint), which permits flexion and extension as well as a slight medial and lateral rotation[WP,unvetted]. Every claim on this page comes from the Leumas anatomy graph and carries its source.

What the knee joint is

The knee joint joins the thigh with the leg and consists of two articulations: one between the femur and tibia, and one between the femur and patella. It is the largest and most complicated joint in the human body. The knee is a mobile trocho-ginglymus (i.e. a pivotal hinge joint), which permits flexion and extension as well as a slight medial and lateral rotation[WP,unvetted]. The atlas records it as a joint at the organ scale in the human body.

Where the knee joint is

It sits in the lower limb, within the skeletal system. Positioned deliberately as part of this species body plan.

What the knee joint connects to

The atlas records 14 typed relationships for it, across 5 kinds of connection. part of hindlimb and knee.

Supply and innervation

This dataset asserts no arterial supply, venous drainage or innervation for the knee joint. Only a minority of structures carry those edges here, so an empty answer means nothing has been recorded — not that there is nothing to record.

Also called

Also recorded as joint of knee and articulatio genus. Searching any of those names reaches this page.

Source

Uberon multi-species anatomy ontology (Mungall et al.), CC BY 4.0. Term UBERON:0001485, version 2026-06-19, retrieved 2026-08-24. Licence: CC-BY-4.0.

• Part of: hindlimb and knee.
• A kind of: limb joint and synovial limb joint.
• Adjacent to: patella.
• contains: cruciate ligament of knee, femorotibial joint, ligament of knee joint, patellar ligament, patellofemoral joint and popliteal lymph node.
• connects: femur, patella and tibia.

Questions

Where is the knee joint?

It sits in the lower limb, within the skeletal system. Positioned deliberately as part of this species body plan.

What does the knee joint connect to?

Part of: hindlimb and knee.

Is the knee joint the same in other species?

Leumas holds the same relationship vocabulary for every species it carries, so where another dataset records this structure you can put the two side by side on /compare.