Nerve · Jaw

Auriculotemporal nerve

Nervus auriculotemporalis

The nerve of the jaw joint, the front of the ear and the temple. It leaves the posterior trunk of the mandibular nerve by two roots that split around the middle meningeal artery and rejoin behind it — a buttonhole around an artery, which is the detail that identifies it in a dissection — then runs backward beneath the lateral pterygoid, squeezes between the neck of the mandible and the ear, and turns upward in front of the ear alongside the superficial temporal artery. It supplies the temporomandibular joint itself, the tragus and upper auricle, the ear canal and eardrum, and the skin of the temple, and it carries the secretory fibres to the parotid gland from the otic ganglion. A single nerve therefore covers the jaw joint, the ear canal, the eardrum and the skin in front of the ear — four things a reader would not otherwise group together.