To finish up our bones of the lower limb, we're going to talk about the bones of the foot. Now the foot and the ankle are made up of three sections of bones. And if you remember, that's just like the hand. In the hand, we have the carpals, the metacarpals, and the phalanges. In the foot, we have the tarsals, the metatarsals, and again, the phalanges. The toe bones and the finger bones have the same names. Before we go into these, let's just look at our picture here. We have a top-down view of the bones of the foot. We're looking at a right foot, and in green here, we can see the tarsals, in purple, the metatarsals, and in blue, we see the phalanges. This is going to be the big toe, the pinky toe, and the heel back there.
The tarsals, we're just going to start off by saying these are the seven short bones of the ankle. But we can liken this to the carpals. Remember, there are seven tarsals. There are eight carpals. Sometimes people get those numbers switched. So, seven tarsals. But just like the carpals we said are really more the bones of the back of the hand, well, that's even more so for the tarsals. These tarsals you can see in this picture here, they really make up a lot of the back of the foot. And what you think of as your ankle, probably, where your long bones of the lower leg meet your foot, that's going to be the joint in this first bone here that we've labeled 1a. Now like the carpals, you don't need to know the name of every tarsal, but you likely do need to know the name of this bone and one more bone that we will go over in a second. So this first bone where the tibia joins the ankle is called the talus, and you can see it here in my model foot. It's just this real smooth round bone on top of all the other tarsals. So, we're going to call this the talus, and we say the talus is the top of the ankle, and the talus is the top of the tarsals. Right? So when you look at all your tarsals, this round smooth one on top, that's the talus. And the reason it's round and smooth like that is you can take the tibia and articulate it there in the ankle. As you point or flex your toe, that talus is just going to sort of rock or hinge back and forth in that tibia. You'll see it also has a smooth section on the side—the fibula also articulates with that talus.
The other tarsal you're likely to need to know is going to be the calcaneus. The calcaneus, that's labeled 1b right here. This is your heel bone, and you can see it's sort of in this picture; it's sort of sticking out the back, but it's the biggest tarsal, and it's really noticeable if you look at the foot. Making up almost, like, half or more than half the length of the tarsals is this calcaneus. The heel bone sticks out in the back. If you have to ever have to identify it individually, it's just this really kinda lumpy weird bone. But in the foot, the heel bone calcaneus is very noticeable.
After the tarsals, we get to the metatarsals. The metatarsals are going to be the long bones, and these are going to create the arches of your foot along with some of the tarsals. You have that arch in your foot. That really helps you distribute weight along your foot, and the metatarsals are doing a lot of that job. Now these are going to be just like the metacarpals in the hand. There are five of them. One lines up with each toe. We're going to number them 1 through 5. The most medial one is going to be numbered 1. The most lateral one is going to be numbered 5. So this medial one is going to line up with your big toe, and this lateral one is going to line up with your pinky toe.
That brings us to the phalanges. The phalanges, just like the finger bones, are going to be these 14 tiny long bones. And, again, remember, long bones talk about the shape and how they grow, not about how big they are. This long bone right here at the tip of your toe, pinky toe, that's a really small bone but it's still a long bone. The singular of phalanges, remember, is phalanx, and that just comes from that word that means that Greek battle formation. And, again, just like the fingers, each toe is going to have three phalanges, a proximal, middle, and distal. And we can see that label on the second toe here. A is going to be the proximal, then we have the middle, and C will be that distal phalanx. That's going to be different for the big toe. So the big toe is only going to have two. It does not have a middle phalanx, and we can see that here. It just has the proximal and distal. Remember, that's just like the thumb, only two bones in the thumb, only two bones in the big toe.
That's the foot. Practice more going forward. I'll see you there.