Temporal fossa
Shallow depression on the side of the human skull
The temporal fossa is a fossa (shallow depression) on the side of the skull bounded by the temporal lines above, and the zygomatic arch below. Its floor is formed by the outer surfaces of four bones of the skull. The fossa is filled by the temporalis muscle.
01Anatomy
Boundaries
- Medial/floor: frontal bone, parietal bone, (squamous part of) temporal bone, and sphenoid bone. The floor of the fossa features the pterion (the junction of these four bones).
- Lateral/roof: temporal fascia.
- Anterior: (posterior surface of) the frontal process of zygomatic bone, (the posterior surface of) the zygomatic process of frontal bone, and the maxilla.
- Superior: Pair of temporal lines (superior and inferior temporal lines) that arch across the skull from the zygomatic process of the frontal bone to the supramastoid crest of the temporal bone
- Inferior: zygomatic arch laterally and by the infratemporal crest of the greater wing of the sphenoid medially.
Contents
Relations
Deep to the zygomatic arch, the temporal fossa is inferiorly continuous with the (lateral part of) the infratemporal fossa.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Temporal fossa”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Fossatemporalis.PNG by http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Engusz, Public domain
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