Muscle · Head

Auricularis posterior

Musculus auricularis posterior

Two or three short fleshy strips lying behind the ear, running forward from the mastoid bone — the bony knob you can feel behind the earlobe — to the back of the ear's cup. It draws the ear backwards. Unlike its two companions it has a genuine bony origin rather than hanging from the scalp aponeurosis, which makes it the one of the three you can sometimes see contract. Its nerve, the posterior auricular branch, is the first branch the facial nerve gives off after leaving the skull, which makes this small strip a marker for where that nerve emerges.