The temple, also known as the pterion, is a latch where four skull bones intersect: the frontal, parietal, temporal, and sphenoid.

[1] It is located on the side of the head behind the eye between the forehead and the ear.

Cladistics classify land vertebrates based on the presence of an upper hole, a lower hole, both, or neither in the cover of dermal bone that formerly covered the temporalis muscle, whose origin is the temple and whose insertion is the jaw.

Due to its shared spelling (but not shared source) with the word for time, the adjective for both is "temporal" (both "pertaining to time" and "pertaining to the anatomical temple").

Among these changes are thinning of the skin, the appearance of the first gray hairs, and a greater prominence of the superficial temporal artery, which becomes more visible as an individual ages.