Everyone is taught that each side of the nose has three curved shelves of bone and mucosa stacked along the outer wall. Surgeons reporting this year in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports describe a patient whose lowest shelf was not one structure at all. It was split into two, with the extra portion angling downward and toward the septum, and they paired the case with an updated review of every previously documented example.
The condition has a name, bifid inferior turbinate, and almost nobody has one. Radiologists first described it in 1999 in the European Journal of Radiology, and in the quarter-century since, the published literature amounts to a handful of scattered reports.
