sternum

A midventral endochondral skeletal element which represents the origin site of the pectoral muscles[PHENOSCAPE:ad]. Every claim on this page comes from the Leumas anatomy graph and carries its source.

What the sternum is

A midventral endochondral skeletal element which represents the origin site of the pectoral muscles[PHENOSCAPE:ad]. The atlas records it as a organ at the organ scale in the human body.

Where the sternum is

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

What the sternum connects to

The atlas records 21 typed relationships for it, across 8 kinds of connection. part of thoracic rib cage and thoracic segment of trunk.

Supply and innervation

This dataset asserts no arterial supply, venous drainage or innervation for the sternum. 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 vertebrate sternum and breastbone. Searching any of those names reaches this page.

Source

Uberon multi-species anatomy ontology (Mungall et al.), CC BY 4.0. Term UBERON:0000975, version 2026-06-19, retrieved 2026-08-24. Licence: CC-BY-4.0.

• Part of: thoracic rib cage and thoracic segment of trunk.
• A kind of: skeletal element and trunk region element.
• Connected to: pectoral girdle skeleton, rib and true rib.
• contains: body of sternum, cartilage tissue of sternum, costal notches of sternum, manubrium of sternum, sternal angle of sternum and sternal region bone, and 3 more.
• connects: sternoclavicular joint and sternocostal joint.
• contributes to morphology of: thoracic rib cage.
• originates from: pectoralis major.
• inserts into: rectus abdominis muscle.

Questions

Where is the sternum?

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

What does the sternum connect to?

Part of: thoracic rib cage and thoracic segment of trunk.

Is the sternum 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.