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Pituitary gland
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The pituitary gland, whose formal name is the hypophysis, lives in a hollow in the skull with a beautiful name: the sella turcica, a depression in the sphenoid bone. That is where it sits cradled, protected by bone.
The curious thing is that it is not one gland but two joined pieces with completely different origins in the embryo. The back part, the posterior pituitary or neurohypophysis, is nervous tissue, the same material as the brain. The front part, the anterior pituitary or adenohypophysis, is glandular tissue and develops from the primitive gut. And there is one detail that surprises a lot of people: the posterior pituitary does not make hormones. What it does is store and secrete the ones the hypothalamus makes, oxytocin and ADH; it is a warehouse, not a factory.
In brief
The pituitary gland sits cradled in the sella turcica of the skull's sphenoid bone and has two lobes that come from different embryonic tissues.
The posterior pituitary, or neurohypophysis, is nervous tissue; the anterior pituitary, or adenohypophysis, is glandular tissue that develops from the primitive gut.
The posterior pituitary does not make hormones: it stores and secretes the ones the hypothalamus makes, oxytocin and ADH.
Sources (1)
- OpenStax, Rice UniversityAnatomy and Physiology 2e, 17.3 The Pituitary Gland and HypothalamusPublished
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