Game of Thrones star Halfthor, the Mountain Bjornsson, recently broke the Deadlift world record with a 501 kilogram lift. Which is absolutely completely bonkers. But if he had the lifting power of a leaf cutter（用于切割的器械） ant, he'd be able to lift a medium-sized sedan, completely over his head and carry it home. Not bad. And if the mountain had the same relative strength as the Taurus scarab dung（粪） beetle（甲虫）, he could pull a fully（充分地） loaded（装） Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Compared to us, ants and dung beetles and nature's other miniature（微型的） weightlifters are special because they pull off their amazing feats（技艺） of strength without bones.

  And it turns out, for every species with an internal（内的） skeleton, like ours, Earth is home to around 20 species without one, and maybe more. And that got me thinking, why did we end up with our skeletons on the inside instead of the outside? Hey smart people, Joe here. It's time to face the truth. You're just meat in a sack（大袋） tied to a bunch（束） of carefully organized rocks. And that's basically（基本上） what it means to be a vertebrate（ 脊椎动物）.

  And we owe（欠） everything that we are and that we do to our bones. Skeletons are rigid enough for this and flexible（柔韧性） enough for this. It's said that we're built with 206 bones, but one in eight of us have an extra pair of ribs（肋骨）. Some people can even have a pair less, and that doesn't count sesamoids and tendons（[解剖] 腱） in our hands and feet and elsewhere（在别处）. And speaking of feet, you have 52 bones in your feet alone, twice as many as in our spine（脊柱）. And our hands and feet have more than half the bones in our bodies.

  I mean, consider that rocks in your fingers removed by muscles and nerves（神经） to help you click on this video. The oxygen powering（激励） the brain that is watching this is being fed by blood made in your bones. And you're only even able to hear me thanks to tiny little bones in your ears. All of this from body parts that are about 70% mineral（矿物）, made of an inorganic（无生物的） material called hydroxyapatite（[矿]羟磷灰石）. It's combined with a flexible protein（蛋白质） called collagen（[生化] 胶原） to keep you from shattering（粉碎）. As a result, the 20 or so pounds in the average body can withstand（抵挡） one ton（吨） of compression（压缩）.

  And for many of us, they're the last things we'll leave behind. Bones are pretty awesome. And also, awesome. That's the Latin（拉丁的） root（根） for bone. Anyway, where did bones come from? Well, that story goes back at least one and a half billion years, which is a weird（怪异的） place to start, because animals didn't even exist yet.

  But at that moment, violently shifting（替换） tectonic（ 地壳构造的） plates were washing tons（吨） of minerals（矿物） into gauged oceans, the minerals that would one day become skeletons. Life stayed pretty squishy for a while. Early multicellular（[生物] 多细胞的） life depended on the water in which it lived to support those skeleton-less bodies. But then, around 558 billion years ago, through a happy accident of evolution（演变）, life split（劈开） in two, and two different skeleton stories began. On one branch, strange creatures（生物） began to develop the first hard protective（保护的） parts, the precursors（先驱） of exoskeletons（[昆] 外骨骼）, and this set off an arms（臂） race of armor. Newly（新近） shielded organisms might have gotten eaten less, maybe they were better protected from the ocean, but partially（部分地） hard creatures（生物） survived more than their squishy friends.