History Main / ArtisticLicenseBiology

** Female gorilla model is identical to male.
** Baby King penguin modeled after Emperor penguin.

* In the sbemail "bedtime story", The Cheat's bedtime snack is "suudsu", which is skim milk with gummy bears in it. Cow's milk contains lactose, which has a bad effect on animals, with side effects including diarrhea, vomiting and other forms of nastiness.

* Literature/JeffTheKiller has a severely burned face, a GlasgowGrin, and severed eyelids, the last two of which are self-inflicted. This does not impede him in any way, even though such injuries would lead to blindness and death by sepsis in RealLife. Not only that, but after being covered in bleach and alcohol, then set on fire, all that happened was Jeff's face was bleached white. The actual results would have been [[BodyHorror far, far more gruesome]].

A subtrope of HollywoodScience and supertrope to PregnancyDoesNotWorkThatWay. SuperTrope of ImprobableTaxonomySkills, the ability to fully classify an organism with just a cursory examination. Contrast InformedSpecies, for characters that look absolutely nothing like their species.

* HeartInTheWrongPlace: A human's heart is where their left lung should be.

* ImprobableTaxonomySkills: Everyone can classify an organism just by looking.

A subtrope of HollywoodScience and supertrope to PregnancyDoesNotWorkThatWay. Contrast and compare ImprobableTaxonomySkills. Also a deeper trope than InformedSpecies, which is more of a general trope for characters that look absolutely nothing like their species.

** The snakes are shown as shockingly aggressive, actively pursuing prey, whereas most snakes (including those shown in the film) are relatively sedentary; the snakes in the film bite repeatedly for no apparent reason, simply killing without eating the people or defending themselves, and then move to attack and kill other people who are neither a threat nor viable prey. The snakes are described as being so aggressive and violent because they are being stimulated by sexual pheromones, except that snakes are not praying mantids or black widows and do not kill their mates while they have sex. If snakes ''were'' to be brought into a violent frenzy when in the presence of sexual pheromones they would require separate pheromones for each individual species and would be just as likely to attack each other as humans, as any other species would be as much of a threat/competition as the people would.

** In ''Film/JurassicWorld'', the ''Indominus rex'' is depicted as being able to communicate and command the ''Velociraptor'' pack due to having some of their DNA. Just having their DNA realistically wouldn't imprint their behaviour into the ''Indominus'', especially since it's mentioned to have the DNA of many different species into it. The ''Velociraptor'' also wouldn't likely accept the ''Indominus'' as one of their own solely because it has the same "language" in the same way a wolf pack wouldn't just accept a dog as one of its members, as it looks completely different from them.

* ''Film/{{Doom}}'' has the mutant monsters come from the genetic experimentation of long-dead human Martian {{Precursors}}. Fair enough. But it turns out that the mutations are caused by there being a "[[VillainousLinage gene for evil]]" in the "poorly understood 10% of the human genome" which the [[GeneticEngineeringIsTheNewNuke genetically engineered]] chromosome reacts to. Now, when one of these mutants bites a healthy human, it infects them like a ''virus''.

* Oh so very much in the killer snake movie ''Film/{{Anaconda}}'', all in the name of the RuleOfScary. Among other things:

* Yellow, the peanut M&M from [[Advertising/MAndMs the candy commercials]], messes up when he and Red show off their muscles. Yellow boasts "Check out my adenoids!", but adenoids are tonsils, not muscles. Probably more of a GeniusBonus since neither of the M&Ms ('''especially''' Yellow) have ever been portrayed as incredibly smart. Of course, candy obviously doesn't have muscles ([[NightmareFuel thankfully]]), so there's that.

* ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes'': The ChocolateFrostedSugarBombs cereals make Hobbes gag for being too sweet even though felines can't taste sweetness. Ironically, Calvin is the one who thinks the cereals are a little bland without adding them extra sugar. This might be justified by Hobbes [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane possibly being imaginary]].

* ''Series/DoctorWho'' has many, many, many examples shown over the years. Some of these can be {{handwave}}d in one of three ways: 1) The TARDIS doesn't give a literal translation of the Doctor's biobabble, it instead renders something the companions can understand, even if it's wrong. 2) [[BizarreAlienBiology The alien physiology]]/technology in question works differently from our understanding. 3) [[RuleOfCool The Doctor makes it up 'cause it sounds cool.]]

** "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS2E2SomeAssemblyRequired Some Assembly Required]]'' would have been a lot easier to swallow had there been a mention of the guys using magic to augment their biology work, but there wasn't anything said about it. First, it's highly unlikely that all three dead cheerleaders would have had the same blood type and been compatible enough for their parts to be grafted together. Second, there's no way any of their cells would have still been living by the time the bodies were recovered and used. (ditto with the dead football player who was brought back). Third, no one seems to recall that heads can't be transplanted without severing the spinal cord and resulting in complete paralysis. It's hard to imagine that's what the re-animated dead kid had in mind when he wanted a girl built for him.

** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS34E7KillTheMoon Kill the Moon]]" features [[MegaMicrobes giant single-celled prokaryotic spiders]]. Not only would this make eating and web production very difficult, not only is it [[SquareCubeLaw outright impossible]], but the Doctor apparently cannot pronounce "prokaryotic". Throw in the spiders being instantly killed by a spray of disinfectant, the Moon being an egg that somehow gains mass, and the hatched Moonling instantly laying another moon-sized egg exactly where it was before, and the show hit a new low for biological (and scientific) plausibility

* ''Series/The100'': The Mountain Men, whose ancestor survived a nuclear apocalypse from inside a bunker, are unable to metabolize radiation the same way that characters who were born in space on the Ark or on the radiation-soaked ground can. When exposed to radiation, the Mountain Men break out in instantaneous lesions and bleeding wounds, which are treated with blood transfusions from Grounders or citizens of the Ark. The blood transfusions not only prevent further damage from radiation, but heal what wounds they have already sustained. The Mountain Men later move on to bone-marrow transplants from the Arkers they have in captivity, as the bone marrow allows the Mountain Men to metabolize radiation on their own. Their bone marrow plot seems to be "take someone's bone marrow and stick it into anyone else," which is hardly the case in real life. Donor and recipient have to be matched, and with only about 50 donors for 400ish recipients, you'd be lucky to find even one match for people who are not directly related. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]], the Mountain Men are explicitly stated to be able to modify blood and marrow to make any doner/recipiet pairing work. This comes up as a plot point later on when the Grounders are angry at the Arkers for continueing to use Mount Weather.

** The plot hinges on creating a clone from blood samples to harvest the completely separate lifeform hiding out in the original Ripley's chest. Furthermore, red blood cells don't even contain DNA (though, white blood cells do contain DNA, so that might explain it).

** First, a {{double|Subversion}} {{subver|tedTrope}}sion. The film's marketing heavily ran with the "based on a true story" aspect of the incident, but a bear ingesting an entire brick of cocaine is probably enough to kill it before it could really get high off the stuff. But, truth was indeed [[RealityIsUnrealistic stranger than fiction]]—the real-life bear ate ''40 bricks'', or about ''75 pounds of the stuff'' before dying, though he apparently absorbed only 3 to 4 grams of blow into his bloodstream when he died. The double subversion kicks in when the movie version of the bear (a female) lives and has two cubs that are ''also'' addicted to cocaine.

* WebOriginal/JeffTheKiller has a severely burned face, a GlasgowGrin, and severed eyelids, the last two of which are self-inflicted. This does not impede him in any way, even though such injuries would lead to blindness and death by sepsis in RealLife. Not only that, but after being covered in bleach and alcohol, then set on fire, all that happened was Jeff's face was bleached white. The actual results would have been [[BodyHorror far, far more gruesome]].

** The reason why [[HollywoodTactics infrared-guided anti-aircraft Sidewinder missiles]] fired [[JustPlaneWrong from AH-64 Apaches]] failed to lock on Godzilla is because it's [[LiteralMetaphor "cold-blooded"]]. Cold-blooded creatures don't literally have cold blood. They lack built-in mechanisms of keeping their body temperature at a constant level, independent from the environment.

** The premise of the movie (and the book). If the amber-preserved blood was any more than 1 million years old, the DNA would have been irrecoverably decomposed, no matter what it was preserved in. Cloning extinct species from before 1 million years ago is impossible. Also, if the DNA were available, we have absolutely no idea how to turn that DNA into a viable dinosaur egg. You'd need complete information about how the oviducts of that particular species operated even to get started, and we don't even have any fossils of dinosaur oviducts, let alone a clue as to their gestational duration, average internal temperature, etc.

* A Creator/{{Syfy}} remake of ''Film/TheFly'' has a man crushed in an open-shafted elevator (literally, the elevator "shaft" is a chain fence with no gate), it causes his eyes to bulge out while his face turns red, until his head pops and deflates like a whoopie cushion. Where is his skull? Never mind the weight of an open-air elevator being lowered that slowly wouldn't be enough to cause that much damage, most likely just pressing the lungs until he asphyxiated.

** Organ transplants in ''{{Manga/Naruto}}'' tend to work a bit like LEGO with anyone being able to put pieces of other people onto themselves with minimal effort. Eyes are repeatedly removed and given to other people. In one case, a character ([[spoiler:Madara]]) manages to pluck out another character ([[spoiler:Kakakshi]])'s eye by apparently just grabbing it ''with their bare hands'' when running past them during a heated battle. Even better, said character then just plops the eye into their own socket and is ''immediately'' able to use it perfectly. Another character managed to pull out his own eyes and put them into someone else's head without the other person even noticing what had happened. Human-to-animal transplants are apparently flawless, too, as seen when [[spoiler:Itachi]] transplants one of [[spoiler: Shisui's eyes]] into a [[spoiler: crow]], with [[spoiler: the crow]] being able to use said [[spoiler: eye]] without issue for over a decade. The one time that eye surgery is portrayed somewhat realistically, requiring a lengthy recovery period, it is used to temporarily write a character ([[spoiler:Sasuke]]) out of the plot.

** Naruto was born the day of the Demon Fox attack. But at the time of the sealing, he is shown without an umbilical stump. That usually doesn't happen until ten days after birth.
** Surgery in ''{{Manga/Naruto}}'' tends to work a bit like LEGO with anyone being able to put pieces of other people onto themselves with minimal effort. Eyes are repeatedly removed and given to other people. In one case a character manages to pluck out another character's eye by apparently just grabbing it ''with their bare hands'' when running past them during a heated battle. Even better, said character just plops the eye into their own socket and is ''immediately'' able to use it perfectly. Another character managed to pull out his own eyes and put them into someone else's head without that other person noticing what had happened. Human-to-animal transplants are apparently flawless, too, as seen when [[spoiler:Itachi transplants one of Shisui's eyes into a crow]]. The one-time eye surgery is portrayed somewhat realistically, requiring a lengthy recovery period, it is used to temporarily write a character out of the plot.

** In the [[Manga/{{Boruto}} sequel]], Sarada can use her sharingan as a microscope to see viruses. Regardless of magnification, such a feat is impossible with visible light as viruses are just too small. Such a feat would require special dyes, ultraviolet light, or an electron microscope.

* The powers in ''Series/{{Heroes}}'' work in some strange ways, even for fictitious super powers. For example, it's demonstrated that immortal, unageing, unkillable Adam Monroe can age if his power is inactive. That's alright by itself; the problem is [[spoiler:when Arthur Petrelli takes his power, Adam immediately ages 400 years and dies as if he drank from the wrong grail. The body doesn't have an internal clock that measures how long it has existed and causes processes such as cell division appropriate for that age and feels duty bound to catch up if it's been held back]]. The same power shouldn't be able to keep Claire from getting drunk, either. It should prevent brain cell death and liver damage, which, like drunkenness, are caused by alcohol consumption and not the causes of drunkenness itself). If her power interprets the neurochemical effect of drunkenness as damage then it should prevent any change to mental state.

** In ''Film/{{Moonraker}}'', Drax designs a chemical that will kill humans but not animals or plants. Humans actually are animals and a huge chunk of animals roaming the world have similar respiratory systems, meaning that they'd be killed too.