Artistic License Biology / Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius:
  • An episode involves extracting mitochondria from a virus. Viruses aren't cellular and don't have cells, and by extension don't have mitochondria.
  • In "The Eggpire Strikes Back," Jimmy states that because Cindy extracted the secret to entering his lab from Carl and Sheen and betrayed him to the Yolkians, that he's going to erase her short term memory so that she forgets. Thing is, this had happened the day before, so unless Cindy didn't sleep the knowledge would already have been consolidated into long term memory.
• Around the World with Willy Fog: During their journey across India, Fog and his companions pass a herd of elephants which includes at least one calf. Anyone who knows anything about elephants will know the presence of the calf means the adults must all be female, since adult male elephants only approach females to mate and play no part in the rearing of calves. Trouble is, these elephants (with the exception of the calf) all have tusks which, being female Asian elephants, they shouldn't have. Though African elephants of both sexes grow tusks, among Asians only males like Koa ^note a tame elephant the travellers encounter do so and even they are sometimes tuskless. At most, female Asian elephants have very small tusks called tushes.
• Arthur:
  • In "Tales from the Crib", Pal the (non-anthro) dog is seen eating chocolate ice cream and being fine. In real life, chocolate can make dogs sick, with the symptoms ranging from nausea to death. This is fixed in "One Ornery Critter" when Arthur points out that chocolate is very bad for dogs.
  • In "Arthur's Chicken Pox", Arthur hallucinates as the result of said chicken pox, while D.W. gets hers overnight and doesn't experience any non-rash symptoms. In real life, chicken pox does not cause hallucinations, and it generally makes you feel sick and sleepy, even before the rash appears.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: The male bees in "Sweet C" are worker bees, and therefore, should've all been female.
• Taken to the extreme in Batman Beyond, where one villain's scheme is to pass viruses around via credit cards.
• Ben 10:
  • In an episode, some cows and a human were turned into mutant monstrosities due to exposure to an alien mutagen. Fortunately, they were "only briefly exposed", so the mutation reversed itself by the end of the episode.
  • The sequel series Ben 10: Alien Force features numerous human/alien hybrids, biologically impossible enough on its own. One of these has a nonhuman parent of a species made of fire. In Ben 10: Omniverse, they are retconned to actually have been normal humans who were genetically modified and merged with an alien species.
• In an episode of the short-lived The Buzz on Maggie, Maggie's older brother zaps her with a hand buzzer, resulting in X-Ray Sparks. For those who have never heard of the show, it's a high school comedy involving insects. Insects do not have inner skeletons.
• The Casagrandes:
  • In "How to Train Your Carl", Carl claims Komodo dragons are the last living dinosaurs, when they are not even close. The last living dinosaurs are birds. He's admittedly a little boy and might not know better, but the same episode also has an elephant that doesn't mind being ridden. In real life, riding elephants is seen as animal cruelty because, unlike horses, they can't be trained to like it.
  • "Don't Zoo That" has two porcupines shooting their quills, which is actually a misconception.
• The Chocolix: Chocolate is poisonous to dogs in real life. Since that wouldn't make sense for a world where almost everything is chocolate, Chocolyne and Chocomark's dog, Sweetcookie, doesn't have problems eating chocolate cat tongue.
• In the Courage the Cowardly Dog episode "The Magic Tree of Nowhere", when Eustace accidentally wishes for Muriel to come down with an illness, Courage is tasked with making a cure with honey from a hornet's nest. While some species of hornets and wasps can make honey, it's only produced in small amounts and is not fit for human consumption.
• In Danny Phantom, failed cloning resulted in a female, younger version of Danny, named Danielle, who would devolve into ectoplasm if she used her powers. She got better. Cloning should produce a younger version, just a fair bit more so than the cartoon likely portrayed. The entire thing was an obvious reference/homage to The Clone Saga from Spider-Man, which similarly botched cloning in many, many ways.
• Done in The Fairly OddParents! episode where Timmy's Dad's first time on the Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? spoof, "Are You Brighter Than a 6th Grader" had him answer "sea cucumber" to nearly all the questions until the last one, "what kind of cucumber lives in the sea" prompting him to say the wrong answer. Forcing himself to re-attend school, Timmy's Dad retakes the competition and goes on a roll until the last question, "which sea vegetable would suit perfectly on an undersea salad", causes him to hesitate until he finds it in himself to say the right answer. In spite of the name, sea cucumbers are not cucumbers or vegetables in general, but animals — specifically echinoderms, like starfish. Regular cucumbers aren't technically vegetables, even.
• Family Guy:
  • Most of the jokes based on Joe's crippled status fall under this. Anyone who knows ANYTHING about paralysis knows the problem isn't the legs, it's the damage to the spine that keeps the legs or anything below the damage from being used. Leg transplants wouldn't repair the damage at all, correcting the damage to the spine would. Even stranger in that in one episode when he was cured, he got re-paralyzed by a gunshot wound to the lower back, and they also make a lot of jokes about how nothing else below the waist works very well. Like most things on the show, Joe's paralysis mostly seems to run on Rule of Funny.
  • At the end of the episode "Quagmire's Quagmire", Quagmire gets a call from his male-to-female father Ida saying that she's pregnant. As explored on South Park when Mr. Garrison got a sex change, she wouldn't be able to carry a child because, given the time that the episode aired, the surgery more than likely wouldn't have given her the organs needed to do so.

• Futurama:
  • Fry apparently survives a temperature of 109°F (roughly 43°C). In real life, people who reach a fever of 108°F (~42°C) or more almost always die, and the few who do survive are left with major brain damage, because when the body gets that hot vital proteins start to break down.
  • Zoidberg is seen shivering as he claims he's cold-blooded. Cold-blooded animals don't shiver when cold.
  • The crocodiles seen in "I Second That Emotion" have overbites like alligators, instead of interlocking teeth. On the other hand, the alligators from "The Series Has Landed" are properly drawn with overbites, though their skin is green instead of black or gray.
  • In "The Sting", bee royal jelly is colored yellow instead of white (although this may be justified as the bees in question are giant alien bees rather than Earth bees).
  • Rabbits and hares are drawn with noses more like a cat's or a dog's than actual rabbit noses.
  • The scorpion seen in "Bender's Game" has six legs rather than eight.
  • From "Fry and Leela's Big Fling":
    • The proboscis monkeys are drawn without tails.
    • The gazelles in the zoo have body shapes and faces more like those of a deer than an actual gazelle.
    • The thylacines have flexible and striped tails, unlike the real animal. The picture on the sign of the exhibit gets this right, though.
    • The Professor claims Simian 7 is home to all kinds of primates and forbids humans, despite humans also being primates. Clearly, he meant to say all kinds of non-human primates.
  • The toucan seen in "Meanwhile" has three toes in front and one in back. Real toucans have two toes in front and two in the back like parrots, which in this series are drawn with only one toe in the back.
  • One episode involved the auctioning-off of the last extant tin of anchovies, a species which had gone extinct centuries before. There are no such species as "anchovy", as it's a catch-all term for any of 144 species of small fishes.
  • The Slurm Queen defends marketing her secretions as a soft drink by saying "Honey comes from a bee's behind, milk comes from a cow's behind, and have you ever used toothpaste?" The cow's udder is between its hind legs but is not its "behind" in the colloquial sense, and honey is made from pollen carried in the bee's mouth, which is on its front end (albeit possibly just as gross).
• An episode of Garfield and Friends has Wade fall victim to one of Roy's pranks of chewing spicy gum. He later tricks Roy into chewing a piece himself. The thing is, with the both of them being birds, neither of them should be able to detect the spiciness.
• Among the many errors regarding animal physiology and behavior, one of the more minor in Hero: 108 is the Deer King and his men, who neigh, grunt, and whinny like horses even though deer in real life make noises more like they have kazoos stuck in their throats or barking.
• In the Hailey's On It! episode "Beta'd and Hooked" a Blue Ono fish makes dolphin noises. Fish, unlike dolphins and whales, do not produce any sounds at all.
• The Hive:
  • Babee is supposedly an infant, but she looks like a full-grown bee rather than a larva. Her mother is also not a queen, even though all non-queen female bees are sterile.
  • In one episode, Postman Spider breaks his leg. Real spiders don't have bones.
  • One episode involves Buzzbee having persistent sneezing, which his parents think must mean a cold. This is inaccurate for two reasons: colds generally produce a low-grade fever, congestion and malaise as well as sneezing, and bees, being insects, can't sneeze as they don't have lungs.
• In one episode of I Am Weasel, the gluteus maximus is portrayed as a bone instead of a muscle.
• I ♡ Arlo:
  • The alligators of the swamp are drawn more resembling to crocodiles, given their lower teeth are visible when their mouths are closed. This also applies to pictures and websites. Arlo, who is half-alligator, is the only one with a correctly drawn overbite.
  • For Arlo himself, he can swim in both fresh and salt waters without a problem; in reality, alligators are more active in freshwater because their salt glands aren't as strong as those in crocodiles.
  • Arlo can shed his skin as one long peel; while alligators do shed, it's scale by scale rather than all the way down.
  • Arlo can sweat in hot weather; real alligators don't sweat.
  • Despite being a tiger, Alia tends to act more or less like a regular housecat, given she makes cat noises such as meowing and purring, and her bad habit of being easily distracted.
  • White pelicans are among those species present in the swamp; the swamp is in Louisiana, and the only pelican native to that state is the brown pelican.
• In one episode of Johnny Test, Johnny and Dukey go into their sisters' lab and take their ladybug when they run out of insects (which they used by photographing them in products and sending the pictures to the companies so they can get free stuff as an apology). Predictably, things don't go as planned as the ladybug is revealed to be highly unstable and grows into a voracious giant that threatened to eat all vegetation in its path, including an extremely rare giant pansy in Porkbelly's greenhouse exhibit. Unless it was a part of the subfamily Epilachninae (which are in fact herbivores and present a significant problem as crop pests), a majority of ladybugs (family Coccinellidae) people know are carnivorous and feed mainly on aphids. Most jarringly is that Johnny's sisters, who frequently tout themselves as geniuses, never point this out.
  • Also, Dukey, despite being a dog, is able to eat chocolate without getting sick. Though this could be because he was genetically enhanced.
• Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures has an episode where Dr. Quest founds out that Moai statues that he is studying are resonant chambers, and by playing a certain tone could speed up evolution. They discover this by testing some odd-looking grass nearby, which has triple helix DNA. Jeremiah Surd uses this in QuestWorld to devolve Race and Benton into cave men, but only their minds. How this works is never explained since their bodies don't change (since simulations don't have DNA) and there is no suggestion that it can be used in reverse. It also doesn't explain why only certain things are targeted and others aren't, even if they're in range to be affected.
• Justice League:
  • "Fury": A biological inaccuracy serves as the key plot point.
    • Subverted where Superman is felled by a cloud of airborne particles released at him by Aresia. It's assumed to be a fast-acting virus until J'onn's research shows that it is, in fact, an allergen which only affects men.
    • Arisia attempts to wipe out all men on Earth with a deadly "allergen". Allergens are not contagious; different people (and different species) have different allergic reactions to the same substance. And crystals do not make something super-allergic! Also, the episode focuses on the sociological implications rather than the very glaring one of "All non-magically guided humans will die off very quickly with no men to participate in the reproductive process with." Yes, the villain grew up on an island of women who are immortal and don't need to reproduce, but pointing out to her that that's the ONLY place this happens might be helpful.
  • Vixen has the ability to gain the powers of an animal, represented by a ghostly animal shape that surrounds her. Okay so far. In one episode, she uses the power of a snake to grapple someone. Again, makes sense. However, the snake that appears is a cobra rather than a constrictor like a python or an anaconda.
• Krypto the Superdog: Lex Luthor's pet Iguana and Harmless Villain Ignatius often gets himself into trouble using the Phlebotinum or technology of the week to catch an elusive bug or make them bigger, or in another episode, using a time machine to go to the past and try to eat a dinosaur egg. In reality, iguanas are complete herbivores, as any protein is harmful to their health. Although they may accidentally eat a bug or two in the wild, they never actively hunt for anything other than leafy greens, fruits, or vegetables.
• Little Princess:
  • When the Princess has a pet tadpole named Taddy, he grows up overnight. In reality, tadpoles spend at least a few days with only back legs, then later they grow front legs, and then they eventually turn into frogs.
  • Scruff has been shown eating chocolate on occasion. In reality, chocolate is poisonous to dogs.
  • In "Maid's Day Off?", Puss enjoys the taste of jam. In reality, cats can't taste sweetness.
• The Loud House:
  • In "Linc or Swim?", a bee flies back after stinging Lincoln, whereas in real life, unless it had been a bumble bee or a queen bee, it should have died. Also, its stinger is strong enough to puncture a kiddie pool, which shouldn't be possible.
  • In "Purrfect Gig", Luna and Sam sing the cats to sleep at night. In real life, cats sleep whenever they want, including during the day.
  • The flu from "One Flu Over the Loud House":
    • It comes on almost instantly. In reality, influenza takes one to four (usually about two) days to manifest.
    • It spreads from humans to the family's dog, cat, hamster, and canary. While some diseases can indeed spread between species, this is very rare, especially for a disease to spread between five species.
    • It causes a yellowish-green colour in the sick Louds' eye whites. While flu can cause dryness in eyes, it does not change their colour.
  • In "Snow Way Out", Hops somehow survives the snow despite being a frog, which are cold-blooded.
  • In "Fool's Paradise", Lucy gets bleach dumped on her and gets no injuries. In reality, bleach can cause burns on the skin.
  • Some crows have yellow beaks and legs. Real crows have black beaks and legs.
  • In "Love Bird", Walt grows a Beard of Sorrow. Real canaries can't grow beards.
  • In "Present Tense", the kids recall Lynn Sr. having fun with a friendly dolphin, but had a bad experience with a porpoise. In real life, dolphins are more aggressive than porpoises.
  • In "Face the Music with the Casagrandes", Sergio loses his voice from eating something spicy. In reality, not only are birds unaffected by spice, spice can't hurt your throat. Also, in "Stall Monitor", Carol Anne the goat gives birth prematurely from spicy food— in real life, spicy food only causes preterm labour if the woman is sensitive to spicy food, which Carol Anne was evidently not as she had no intestinal problems. Lucy additionally sometimes claims Lynn will need to go to the bathroom after eating her spicy subs, but Lynn obviously has no sensitivities to spicy food.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack plays with this with how medical practices were back in the day with Doctor Barber. One infamous quote from him is, "Silly Flapjack. The human body is a complex system of pulleys and counterweights, all working to manipulate the food hole." This was probably intentional, given how the show revolves around a prepubescent sailor and his captain who uses a talking whale as a ship trying to find an island made of candy.
  • In the episode where everyone catches the plague, Dr. Barber needs the uninfected Flapjack's blood to make a cure. Vaccines are actually made by studying infected blood.
• In Mummies Alive!, for the most part the titular mummies are treated as though they're essentially the living dead reanimated to guard the reborn prince, such as them being the only beings immune when the Tree of Life was damaged and everything else began to age rapidly. However, their need for food appears genuine rather than purely psychological; when the mummies underwent a "Freaky Friday" Flip in "Who's Who", Rath and Armon are legitimately shown as being hungry when they swapped bodies, with Armon-in-Rath feeling full after eating only a fraction of his usual large meals while Rath-in Armon felt Armon's hunger pains, neither of which would apply if they just ate because they wanted to rather than because they had to. Possibly justified because ancient Egyptians routinely left offerings of food in tombs, so presumably believed the deceased did get hungry.
• Oggy and the Cockroaches:
  • The cockroaches have been shown to have endoskeletons on numerous occasions via X-Ray Sparks. Real cockroaches have exoskeletons.
  • In "Freezing Cold", the cockroaches are shown having navels. Cockroaches, not being mammals, do not have navels.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • In one episode, someone pitches ideas for an "inaction figure" based on Perry the Platypus, one of which is "The Mad Marauding Marsupial of Death." Right continent, wrong order. The platypus is a monotreme, not a marsupial.^note Thankfully, the creators took notice of this and have later episodes describe platypodes as monotremes. Ferb has also stated that the platypus is the only mammal that lays eggs; apparently, he's never heard of echidnas. Also, in one episode Phineas states that platypuses are supposed to stay inside at night. One problem, platypuses are mostly nocturnal. Perry's behavior and appearance, in general, is nothing like that of normal platypodes (yes, that's the plural). He doesn't have webbed hands/front feet and his tail is more like a beaver's (the platypus is covered in fur all but for their bills and feet). He also has his eyes open when underwater, when real platypuses close their eyes when diving. Overlooking all this is seemingly played for Rule of Cool, though.
  • The ostriches in the show have three toes on each foot, instead of two like in real life.
  • Crows are drawn with yellow bills and feet when real crows have black bills and feet (save for the white-billed crow).
  • Alligators are drawn as more closely resembling crocodiles (i.e. V-shaped snouts, lower teeth visible when the mouth is closed). "Druselsteinoween" had a gator with a more correctly shaped snout, but unfortunately still has interlocking teeth. The intro of "OWCA Files", however, briefly showed gators with proper overbites, but the ones that appear later on are given crocodile-like mouths.
  • "Belly of the Beast" claims sharks have molars and incisors (they do not).
  • "Phineas and Ferb Save Summer" has a cave salamander that is colored more like a surface-world salamander and has fish-like gills. Real cave salamanders have feather-like gills, not unlike those of young salamanders or axolotls.
  • Dennis is shown to have pads on the bottom of his feet, something real rabbits do not have. He and the other rabbits in the show are drawn with stereotypical cat-like pink noses instead of slit-shaped ones real rabbits possess.
  • Pelicans are drawn with oversized bill pouches and generic bird feet with only three toes.
  • Bats are drawn with three small fingers like pterosaurs, instead of a single thumb.
  • The Tyrannosaurus in "It's About Time!" has three fingers instead of two, and it is shown as plantigrade in many shots. Also, no dinosaur lived 300 million years ago.
  • Maggie the Macaw in "The O.W.C.A. Files" would inconsistently have zygodactyl feet (accurate for parrots) in some scenes and ansiodactyl feet in others.
• Rugrats (1991): In "Bow Wow Wedding Vows", when the puppies are first seen, their eyes are open. However, when dogs are first born, their eyelids are usually sealed shut - it takes several days for them to open.
• Shaun the Sheep: Outside of a cameo character in one episode, none of the rams in the flock have horns. Justified for Timmy and Shaun, who are lambs who haven't developed horns, but even the older looking males such as Nuts are hornless. Played with since hornless rams, while uncommon, do exist.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Treehouse of Horror V", Flanders ends up the ruler of the world and demands that everyone be happy and non-aggressive under his rule, or he surgically removes their frontal lobes to force them to be happy. Actually, damage (not to mention removal) of the frontal lobe would cause depression and aggressive behavior, not alleviate it.
  • The part in "Bart on the Road" when Bart and co. accidentally drive through the cornfield. Depending on the school, Spring Break traditionally takes place in March or April. While it was a funny joke, corn doesn't usually get that tall until early summer.
  • "Cape Feare" featured electric eels that have flickering forked tongues as if they're snakes, plus they're in a North American river.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • The series pretty much tears the book of the biology of marine life. The most common example is SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward and Mr. Krabs (occasionally) having skeletons despite them being invertebrates. And Squidward is an octopus who has a lipped mouth underneath his eyes (and big, drooping nose!) instead of a beak in the centerpoint of his arms, which there is only six of instead of eight (although that was done on purpose to make animation easier).
  • Not to mention Plankton (a copepod) being incorrectly referred to as a "single-celled organism" on multiple occasions, either by himself or others.
  • And Sandy is supposed to be a tree squirrel but she hibernates like a ground squirrel, and she also has a pink, hairless nose like a cat.
  • Seahorses apparently lactate in SpongeBob. Seahorses are fish, just let that sink in.
  • One episode shows SpongeBob's mother being pregnant with him (and having a square belly) and giving birth to him in a hospital. Sea sponges, besides being unable to walk and talk, simply release eggs and sperm into the water; they don't become pregnant or give live birth. (They can also reproduce asexually, by budding, which SpongeBob himself is seen doing to prove a point to Sandy.)
  • One episode involves snail milk. Snails are not mammals.
  • Done in-episode with Wormy the caterpillar, who changes into a butterfly overnight; in reality, it takes about ten days for a caterpillar's metamorphosis to take full effect. Lampshaded by Sandy: "You weren't s'posed to change 'til I got back!"
• In Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: The Bad Batch, the Kaminoans manufacturing the clone army report that they're running out of Jango Fett's genetic material to copy, and pursue respectively Boba Fett, then Omega as new clone templates (since they're unaltered clones of the original). This complaint frankly makes no sense whatsoever: we've been able to replicate DNA in a lab for decades, a process the Kaminoans must know given that Jango by himself couldn't possibly provide enough genetic material for each of the hundreds of millions of clones^note per the Disney-era reference Star Wars Complete Locations; earlier sources, including the Attack of the Clones novelization, gave much smaller numbers to be made from a fresh sample. For that matter the Kaminoans are already doing things with the clones that we can't do, including engineering them to grow and age twice as fast and to be more obedient to superior orders. The issue is ultimately rendered moot at the end of Bad Batch season 1 when the Empire glasses Kamino to cover up their part in the conspiracy that brought Palpatine to power.
• 1973/74 Super Friends episodes:
  • "The Shamon U". A miniaturized sperm whale returns to normal size on a city street. It should be crushed by its own weight and be unable to breathe, but it's just fine.
  • "The Watermen''. When the title aliens extract silicon from sea water, it causes the sea water to immediately turn into red tide. Just one problem: red tide is caused by microorganisms, not a lack of silicon. This is lampshaded when Professor Matey notes that it should be impossible.
• The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! episode "Mario and the Beanstalk" features a garbanzo beanstalk covered in... pea pods. It isn't due to Unreliable Illustrator, either, since the veggies the Princess and Toad pull out from them to defeat a swarm of Hoopsters are unmistakably giant peas. Try not to think too hard about why garbanzo beans would grow into an enormous pea plant.
• The Transformers:
  • A group of Decepticons, known as the Predacons, actually compose of Razorclaw (a lion), Rampage (a tiger), Divebomb (an eagle), Headstrong (a rhino), and Tantrum (a bull). In real life, the alt-modes of the last two are supposed to be herbivores — very vicious herbivores, but herbivores just the same.
  • Two such cases: the Cosmic Rust and Hate Plague spores were stated to be viral diseases, even though both were clearly specified as spores and could become airborne. Beast Wars and Beast Machines played this straight for the most part, with the former containing actual viruses that needed to be injected to be potent, and the latter's version of the Hate Plague acting more like a traditional virus with a specific carrier. Sadly, the latter's transformation lock "virus" was also airborne, meaning it was more likely a bacterial or spore-like agent. (Or, quite possibly, the other kind of virus).
• 12 oz. Mouse:
  • In the first episode, Fitz throws up. Mice (and rodents in general) can't vomit in real life.
  • Fitz's wife has human-like breasts.
  • Skillet somehow only makes rabbit screams instead of chinchilla ones. Real chinchillas squeak, spit, chatter their teeth and (oddly) bark.
• Wonder Pets!:
  • Ducks and turtles don't urinate. At least, not the way the show portrays they do. However, they could've been urinating the way they do in reality, as we never actually see them pee, and the terminology they were using was to be simplified for the young audience.
  • Ming-Ming can fly despite not having grown flight feathers yet.
• Yin Yang Yo!: In one episode, Master Yo once suggested that he was related to raccoons, which was a popular scientific theory... once. Genetic testing conclusively proved otherwise years before the episode aired; now, it's generally accepted by zoologists that pandas are members of the bear family, even if their unusual bi-colored fur makes them the black (and white) sheep of that family.

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