Determining the risk of injury from an automobile collision to the thorax requires knowledge of the properties of the skeletal components that comprise the thorax. The direction of osteons in cortical bone has been shown to be well correlated with the strongest loading direction of the bone as a whole. Therefore, determining the orientation of osteons in the rib cage is an important step in understanding the behavior of the rib cage under mechanical load. Histological slides were created in series from various regions of the each rib in the thorax. Image analysis of the digitized histology sections included the use of a computer algorithm created in Matlab to track the center of each osteon throughout the rib section. Analysis of the results showed variations in the osteon direction between samples taken from the anterior, lateral and posterior surfaces of the rib cage. The results indicate a trend in osteon offset angle between the three locations studied. The second purpose of this study was to investigate the strength of human ribs subjected to dynamic three-point bending. For all subjects, the anterior specimens failed at a significantly lower peak stress than the lateral (p=0.01) and posterior (p=0.01) specimens. The average elastic modulus from all tests was 22 GPa. The results of this study suggests that there are variations in the mechanical properties of the rib cage. These variations need to be considered when developing an accurate method of thoracic injury prediction.