The vertebrate endoskeleton is composed of bone, cartilage, tendons, and ligaments. Bones are made of cells in a very special hard extracellular matrix that contains calcium. As you can see, there are many different types of bones: short bones, flat bones, and structural bones. We're going to take a look at long bones. You can see a long bone right here. What's special about long bones is that they have a medullary cavity, which contains red and yellow bone marrow. This is very important for the production of blood cells.
There are some special cell types in bones that I want to mention, which are osteoblasts and osteoclasts. Osteoblasts form bone, and osteoclasts reabsorb bone. These cells are involved in blood calcium homeostasis, the endocrine regulation of it, through the hormones parathyroid hormone and calcitonin. If you want to know more about that, I recommend you check out our videos on the endocrine system.
With that, let's go ahead and flip the page.