Temple indicates the side of the head behind the eyes. The bone beneath is the temporal bone as well as part of the sphenoid bone. The estimated thickness of the temple is about the thickness of an eggshell.
Cladists classify land vertebrates based on the presence of an upper hole, a lower hole, both, or neither in the cover of dermal bone which formerly covered the temporalis muscle, whose origin is the temple and whose insertion is the jaw. The brain has a lobe called the temporal lobe.
The word "temple" as used in anatomy has a separate etymology from the word temple, meaning "place of worship". Both come from Latin, but the word for the place of worship comes from templum, whereas the word for the part of the head comes from Vulgar Latin *tempula, modified from tempora, plural form ("both temples") of tempus, a word that meant both "time" and the part of the head. Due to the common source with the word for time, the adjective for both is "temporal" (both "pertaining to time" and "pertaining to the anatomical temple").
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