Buccinator muscle the cheek area, which aids in holding the cheek to the teeth during chewing. This action causes the muscle to keep food pushed back on the occlusal surface of the posterior teeth, as when a person chews. By keeping the food in the correct position when chewing, the buccinator assists the muscles of mastication. It aids whistling and smiling, and in neonates it is used to suckle. In the past the buccinator muscle was also written as bucinator muscle. A "bucinator" in classical Latin is a trumpeter, or more precisely, the person who blows the "bucina". The name "bucina" could
Muscle from the Latin "musculus" meaning "little mouse" perhaps because of the shape of certain muscles or because contracting muscles look like mice moving under the skin. The anatomy of muscles includes gross anatomy, which comprises all the muscles of an organism, and microanatomy, which comprises the structures of a single muscle. Muscle tissue is a soft tissue, and is one of the four fundamental types of tissue present in animals. There are three types of muscle tissue recognized in vertebrates: Cardiac and skeletal muscles are "striated" in that they contain sarcomeres that are packed into highly regular arrangements of bundles;