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Mammals
- Most reindeer appearing in many Christmas specials look absolutely nothing like their real-life counterparts, instead looking more like mule deer, roe deer, or white-tailed deer. Regardless of shape and markings, they are invariably depicted as deer-sized (in reality reindeer are closer to the size of horses).
- Most cartoon porpoises look nothing like real porpoises, instead looking more like bottlenose dolphins. Real porpoises have shorter mouths, blunt snouts, and triangular dorsal fins.
- Most cartoon sperm whales are drawn with wide jaws and head, upper teethnote , belly-linings like a baleen whale, and the blowhole on the top of the head.
- Most cartoon jaguars are shown with leopard-like rosettes or even cheetah-like solid spots (also occurring in cartoon leopards) instead of larger, scarcer rosettes with spots in the centerpoint. They will also have longer tails like a leopard or a cheetah.
- Many cartoon aardvarks tend to look more like anteaters, with long snouts that point downwards rather than straight and lack the pig-like noses at the tip. These snouts will also be flexible like an elephant's trunk.
Birds
- Many cartoon parrots, toucans, and cuckoos are portrayed not resembling any real species, particularly having bizarre coloring and patterns in the case of the former two.
Fishes
- Most cartoon fishes look nothing like any real-life species, unless if they are realistic.
- Many cartoon catfishes and dogfishes are often depicted as a cross between a fish and a cat or dog respectively. Although this may have been for a Visual Pun.
- Many cartoon electric eels look more like morays than their real-life counterparts, which are brown and have toothless mouths. It doesn't help that electric eels are often depicted living in the ocean, despite being freshwater fish.
- Most cartoon blobfish are depicted resembling their infamous "ugly" form on land, which is actually the result of tissue damage from water pressure as they are taken from their natural habitat at extreme depths. When left in their natural habitat, blobfish don't look much different than most fish.
Invertebrates
- Many cartoon invertebrates have mouths that do not resemble what the real animals have. Particularly, arthropods having mouths that move up and down like a vertebrate's, leeches having a ring of fangs like a lamprey, and cephalopods having lipped mouths in the front of their heads instead of beaks in the center of their arms.
- Most cartoon arthropods are depicted with more vertebrate-like features, such as fewer limbs, vaguely mammalian faces, and the insects and arachnids having only two eyes.
- Most cartoon fireflies look nothing like their real-life counterparts, the only indication of such being a firefly is the light on its abdomen.
- Most cartoon fleas look nothing like their real-life counterparts, instead looking like nondescript cartoon "bugs" or even tiny human-like creatures.
