sphenoid bone
An unpaired bone situated at the base of the skull in front of the temporal bone and basilar part of the occipital bone. The sphenoid bone is one of the seven bones that articulate to form the orbit. Its shape somewhat resembles that of a butterfly or bat with its wings extended. Every claim on this page comes from the Leumas anatomy graph and carries its source.
What the sphenoid bone is
An unpaired bone situated at the base of the skull in front of the temporal bone and basilar part of the occipital bone. The sphenoid bone is one of the seven bones that articulate to form the orbit. Its shape somewhat resembles that of a butterfly or bat with its wings extended. The atlas records it as a bone at the organ scale in the human body.
Where the sphenoid bone is
It sits in the head, within the skeletal system. Positioned deliberately as part of this species body plan.
What the sphenoid bone connects to
The atlas records 40 typed relationships for it, across 10 kinds of connection. part of craniocervical region, facial skeleton and head.
Supply and innervation
This dataset asserts no arterial supply, venous drainage or innervation for the sphenoid 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 os sphenoidale, sphenoid, sphenoidal bone, butterfly bone, os sphenoidum and sphenoid complex. Searching any of those names reaches this page.
Source
Uberon multi-species anatomy ontology (Mungall et al.), CC BY 4.0. Term UBERON:0001677, version 2026-06-19, retrieved 2026-08-24. Licence: CC-BY-4.0.
- Part of: craniocervical region, facial skeleton and head.
- A kind of: bone element, endochondral bone, pneumatized bone and skeletal element.
- Adjacent to: clivus of occipital bone.
- contains: alisphenoid bone, anterior clinoid process of sphenoid bone, basisphenoid bone, body of sphenoid, body of sphenoid bone and dorsum sellae of sphenoid bone, and 13 more.
- contributes to morphology of: alisphenoid bone, basisphenoid bone, orbitosphenoid, presphenoid bone and sphenoid bone pterygoid process.
- connects: spheno-petrosal fissure, sphenofrontal suture, sphenoparietal suture and sphenozygomatic suture.
- composed of: bone tissue.
- overlaps: splanchnocranium.
Questions
Where is the sphenoid bone?
It sits in the head, within the skeletal system. Positioned deliberately as part of this species body plan.
What does the sphenoid bone connect to?
Part of: craniocervical region, facial skeleton and head.
Is the sphenoid 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.