The pelvic girdle is also known as the pelvis skeleton or bony pelvis. It is a large, bilaterally symmetric, compound bone structure, consisting of the os coxa, sacrum and coccyx. The top or forward part of the pelvis is called the pelvic inlet, and its edge the pelvic brim. A related skeletal structure, found mainly in birds and dinosaurs, is the synsacrum.
In mammals, the pelvic girdle has a gap in the middle, significantly larger in females than in males. Babies pass through this gap when they are born.
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Famous quotes containing the word skeleton:
“The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)