“A final note, added in revision: some sources refer to two trunks or divisions of the internal iliac artery: a posterior trunk that gives rise to the iliolumbar, lateral sacral, and superior gluteal arteries, and an anterior trunk that gives rise to everything else. If that’s what your professor tells you, smile and nod and keep your heretical thoughts to yourself. Personally, I regard the notion of trunks of the internal iliac artery alongside phlogiston, luminiferous aether, and snorkeling sauropods, as romantic nonsense at best.” HAHA! True!
Here’s a thing I put together to help my students understand the many branches of the internal iliac artery in humans. In the image above, we’re looking in superomedial view into the right half of the sacrum and pelvis. Bones are white, ligaments blue, the piriformis muscle sort of meat-colored, and arteries red (for a tour of the pelvis identifying all of this stuff, see my pelvic foramina slideshow). At the top is a big inverted Y-shape: the common iliac arteries branching from the abdominal aorta, which continues on, much reduced, as the median sacral artery. The right common iliac artery is shown bifurcating into the external iliac artery, which continues on out of the pelvis to become the femoral artery, and the internal iliac artery, source of much fear and doubt.
The first thing to understand is that any particular branching pattern of the internal iliac arteries, whether…
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jari m 