occipital bone

The bone at the lower, posterior part of the skull. Every claim on this page comes from the Leumas anatomy graph and carries its source.

What the occipital bone is

The bone at the lower, posterior part of the skull. The atlas records it as a bone at the organ scale in the human body.

Where the occipital bone is

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

What the occipital bone connects to

The atlas records 28 typed relationships for it, across 9 kinds of connection. part of craniocervical region, head and neurocranium, and 1 more.

Supply and innervation

This dataset asserts no arterial supply, venous drainage or innervation for the occipital bone. 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 occipital complex, occipital squama and os occipitale. Searching any of those names reaches this page.

Source

Uberon multi-species anatomy ontology (Mungall et al.), CC BY 4.0. Term UBERON:0001676, version 2026-06-19, retrieved 2026-08-24. Licence: CC-BY-4.0.

• Part of: craniocervical region, head, neurocranium and occipital region.
• A kind of: bone element, cranial bone and flat bone.
• Attaches to: nuchal ligament.
• contains: clivus of occipital bone, groove for transverse sinus of squamous part of occipital bone, highest nuchal line attachment site, hypoglossal canal, inferior nuchal line attachment site and inferior nuchal line of squamous part of occipital bone, and 4 more.
• inserts into: rectus capitis anterior, rectus capitis lateralis muscle, rectus capitis posterior major and rectus capitis posterior minor.
• connects: atlanto-occipital joint, lambdoid suture and occipitomastoid suture.
• Develops from: sclerotome.
• surrounds: foramen magnum.

Questions

Where is the occipital bone?

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

What does the occipital bone connect to?

Part of: craniocervical region, head, neurocranium and occipital region.

Is the occipital bone 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.