How it works

Each examination brings up to four new specimens, and once you’ve cataloged a few, earlier ones that are due for review join them on the bench, so a session can be larger than four and you can carry on for as long as you like. Every specimen comes as an engraved plate with a case file, its proper name and a nickname you already know. Once you’ve worked out what each one is and filed it away, the examination closes and the lab leaves you a field note about one of them to take with you.

Getting a bone right five times in one sitting proves nothing, because you’d have lost it again by Thursday, so the lab only counts one correct answer per bone per day. Once you’ve named it correctly on three different days, the last of them typed from memory, it’s cataloged and it moves into the archive.

The lab is split into two tracks. The Explorer track is where everyone starts, and its seven case files cover the 29 bones and groups you would recognize by name, from the arm and shoulder down to the foot and up to the head. The Scholar track opens later, and its eight case files go inside the groups you have already met: the bones of the braincase one at a time, the wrist and the ankle bone by bone, the ribs by class, the finger and toe bones by row, and the two neck vertebrae with names of their own.

Case files open in order. The next one opens once every specimen in the current one has been identified correctly at least once, so a case you are working through does not hold up the one behind it. The Scholar track asks for more: it is issued once every Explorer specimen has been answered correctly on two separate days. Nothing is hidden for the sake of it, the order just means you always meet the big bones before the small ones inside them.

A week after you catalog a bone it lands on your desk again without warning, and after that the checks come at growing intervals. If you get it right, the gap before the next check stretches out, and if you get it wrong it goes back into training for a while, which is simply the check doing its job. Nothing is ever marked as known for good, and that is what makes the archive worth trusting.

You can use the lab without one, and your progress lives in your browser. That works until you clear your browsing data, switch phones, or want to pick up on your laptop what you started on your phone, and at that point a free account is the answer, because it keeps a copy of your record and hands it to whichever device you sign in on.

Signing in is your email address and a code we send you, so there’s no Bone Room password to create or remember. From the app’s Privacy screen you can export your records, delete the cloud copy, or delete the whole account whenever you like. The privacy page lists everything an account stores.

The adult skeleton has 206 bones, 80 in the axial skeleton and 126 in the appendicular skeleton, but nowhere near 206 individual names, because many bones come in numbered or grouped sets, like ribs 1 to 12, most of the vertebrae, and the phalanges of the fingers and toes.

The Bone Room teaches 48 individual bone names and introduces the remaining bones through those numbered or grouped sets, so its 67 case entries account for every one of the 206. The arithmetic is on the screen where you can see it.

Counts follow OpenStax, Anatomy and Physiology 2e, section 7.1, Divisions of the Skeletal System.

Read the whole accounting, bone by bone