Аннотация:Understanding the growth patterns of the humanfacial skeleton is essential for scientic, forensic,and medical purposes. However, there has beensome controversy regarding the extent of sexualdimorphism in the facial skeleton in infancy andearly childhood. This study aims to describe thedevelopmental aspects of sexual dimorphism inhuman midfacial ontogeny.The dataset included clinical CT scans of 247male and 184 female non-adult individuals and 36male and 33 female adult individuals as referencesamples. 25 linear measurements describingthe facial skeleton were obtained from 3D reconstructedskulls. Basic descriptive statistics,growth increments, smoothing spline models andcorrelation matrices were calculated for each agecohort (4 cohorts for infants up to 1 year, 5 yearlycohorts up to 5 years) of each sex. Ontogeneticchanges until the age of 5 were also comparedwith a published forensic sample.The study revealed stable differences betweenmales and females in most variables from birthuntil maturity. However, while mean values inthe male group are higher in absolute terms,females present higher percentages of attainedadult size for most measurements until the ageof 5. Correlation matrices among the age cohortsshow moderate associations for males and weakassociations for females, correlation patternsbeing different at all ages. Comparison with theforensic data revealed fairly consistent resultsonly for 5 out of 10 variables.The study shows that males and females differsubstantially in craniofacial measurements duringontogeny while the growth trends seem to besimilar at all ages.