Bones Do Not Belong There

♫ The stem bone's connected to the leaf bone... ♫

"Why do Piranha Plant have bone in it?"

— Brian David Gilbert on Super Mario Bros.

If you've ever looked at a human or animal skeleton, you've probably noticed they don't have much in the way of ears or noses. Some artists don't let that stop them, and add "ear bones"^note While there are actual ear bones, they are behind the eardrum and have nothing to do with the cartilaginous outer ear. or "nose bones" (or "penis bones"^note Despite common slang for a Raging Stiffie being a "boner", the (human) penis does not have a bone in it (many mammals, including some other primates, have a baculum).). Likewise, you may see skeletal or undead invertebrates with "bones", despite the only structures that come close being the exoskeletons in arthropods. Cartilaginous fish like sharks and rays do have skeletons, but they're made of cartilage rather than bone (they still look pretty much the same under an x-ray though, so only examples in which it's clearly bone and not cartilage should be included).

Expressive Skull is a related trope. Compare Removable Shell. Feather Fingers and Tailfin Walking may implicitly rely on this. Often shown via X-Ray Sparks or a Funny X-Ray.

Unlike Eyes Do Not Belong There, this is usually Played for Laughs rather than Played for Horror.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Inuyasha: The demon that drags Kagome down the well in the first chapter/episode is a Mix-and-Match Critter consisting of a roughly humanoid torso with a centipede lower body. It's shown to have an endoskeleton in its lower body despite centipedes being invertebrates.
• One Piece: When Usopp gets hit in the face by Mr. 4's four-ton bat, an x-ray of Usopp's head briefly flashes on screen to emphasize the damage, showing that he has a bone in his long nose that gets broken by the impact.
• Princess Knight: In one episode of the old anime, a whale makes an appearance on-screen and eats a bunch of different creatures. One of them is a jellyfish. After eating it, he spits out its skeleton.

Fan Works

• Vow of Nudity: The oozes on The Isle of Slimes have evolved into plasmoids who 'wear' the skeletons of their kills within their bodies. The skeletons appear to be largely cosmetic (Haara breaks one enemy's spine to no functional effect), but their presence warns her the other kidnapped slaves are still alive, as each has a unique body part^note the orc's tusks, the yuan-ti's snakelike lower half, and the elf's prosthetic foot she'd notice if they'd been killed and turned into a plasmoid skeleton.

Films — Live-Action

• In the Animated Credits Opening of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Santa is given X-Ray Sparks by a broken Christmas bulb, showing bones inside his hat.
• Werewolf (1996): The werewolf skeleton has bone ears that curve downward to look like floppy dog's ears.

Literature

• Captain Underpants: At the end of the seventh book and the beginning of the eighth, George and Harold are shown as skeletons due to the X-rays produced by them using the Purple Porta-Potty time machine without letting it cool down. Their skulls have each boy's characteristic hairstyle, but as bone: Harold's unruly poof and George's super-straight flat-top. Strangely enough, they also both have shirts, but no pants.

Live-Action TV

• Scrubs: Subverted in "My ABCs", a crossover with Sesame Street. J.D. has a fantasy about treating a patient. When he brings out the x-ray, it only shows the hand bones of the puppeteer within a muppet's body.
  J.D.: I see what the problem is. (shows the x-ray) You have a hand inside of you.
  Muppet: This explains so many things.

Magazines

• Playboy has an Illustrated History of Sex, with drawings by Ronald Searle. During the Renaissance, alchemists were fervently trying to turn something or other into gold. A Background Gag has a standing skeleton in an alchemist's lab, with three or four vertebrae-like bones extending from the pubis. This means the man would have had a permanent erection, making urination challenging.^note Incidentally, phosphorus was discovered by trying to turn urine into gold.

Toys

• Around Halloween, a common sight in some stores is animal skeletons with visible bone ears, or in the case of birds, wings with bones in place of feathers. Even more egregiously, there are bone spiders, animals that don't even have bones as we would consider them, bone octopuses, which have no hard parts at all except the beak, and a bone pumpkin.
• Series 2 of Treasure X introduced the concept of "Mini Beasts", living animal skeletons that resemble the skeleton treasure hunters. Some of these animals are skeletal insects and spiders, creatures that have an exoskeleton in real life.

Video Games

• Against the Storm: In the Scarlet Orchard biome, you can excavate the bones of giant arachnids, which don't have bones in real life.
• Among Us: Crewmate corpses have a Stock Femur Bone sticking out where the spine should be.
• Banjo-Tooie: The Big Bad of the previous game Gruntilda is resurrected as a skeleton. Not only does her skull have a nose, but she's also got a ribcage on the outside of her dress.
• Crash Tag Team Racing: Crash's skeletal "Realistic Crash" skin features triangular ear bones.
• Cuphead: Midway through her Boss Fight, Cala Maria is bitten on the hips by two electric eels. The following X-Ray Sparks show her whole skeleton, which also includes double-bulbed bones inside the tentacles of the octopus she wears as a hat. This is actually a foreshadowing of her transformation into a Gorgon and the tentacles into snakes.
• Dark Souls: The skeleton blacksmith Vamos has a beard made out of bones.
• EarthBound (1994): The desert areas of the game include enemies called Skelpions. As the name suggests, they're scorpion skeletons, even though real-life scorpions are arthropods and thus don't actually have endoskeletons.
• Friday Night Funkin' Minus: Mean Boyfriend's game over screen shows a bone in the brim of his hat: the hat isn't part of his head and Beta and Blue don't have bones in theirs, so why there's a bone in his hat specifically is anyone's guess.
• Friday Night Funkin' X-Ray Mod: Miku's hair and even her hair ribbons have noticeable bones in them; while initially understandable because she's an angel, Boyfriend, who is also an angel, doesn't have hair bones.
• A Hat in Time: One level features an x-ray image of the Human Alien protagonist, showing that her ponytail has a bone in it.
• Averted for the most part by Transparent Neopets, which show such attention to detail like the Transparent Elephante having no bones in its trunk. However, there are a few Artistic License-based exceptions, such as the Transparent Lenny having arm-like bones in its wings to account for its Feather Fingers.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: According to x-rays taken during the DLC case, Phoenix has hair bones, and Edgeworth's cravat is made of bone.
• Plants vs. Zombies uses X-Ray Sparks for zombies killed by electrical attacks. Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time has Bug Zombies which are Airborne Mooks carried by giant insects. If you kill one with an electrical attack, the X-Ray Sparks effect will show a skeleton within the insect as well as the zombie.
• Poppy Playtime has an unusual example which is absolutely Played for Horror. Despite being robotic, The Prototype has bones visible in its arm. It's likely that the bones are from one of his victims and he incorporated them into himself.
• Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse: Max for some ungodly reason has bones in his ears. Between that and his shark-like teeth, he comes off as quite unnerving as a skeleton.
• An odd example in The Simpsons Arcade Game occurs when Marge gets electrocuted, she performs the standard cartoon skeleton but also has very long skeletal bunny ears beneath her hair. One, ears don't have bones. Two, the ears are a holdover from an early idea when Marge would have been from Groening's "Life in Hell" Comic strip and have had Rabbit ears hidden beneath her hair (These Rabbit ears also appear during Marge's attack animation).
• In Super Smash Bros. 64, when hit by electrical attacks, Mario and Luigi's prominently bulbous noses show as part of their skulls, and numerous characters: Mario and Luigi again, Link, Fox, Pikachu, and Ness, still have their ears.
  • Game Mod Smash Remix includes Wolf (who still has his cheek fur), Lucas, Conker (who still has his poofy tail), Mewtwo, Young Link, Sheik, Dr. Mario (who still has his nose, like his non-doctor counterpart), and Wario (who still has not only his nose, but his moustache as well) in its list of ear-skulled characters. Banjo, Goemon and Ebisumaru don't have ear bones, but they do have snout, hair and nose bones respectively, while Marina Liteyears (a robot) and Mad Piano (a, well, piano) are two characters who shouldn't have skeletons at all.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins: One of the enemies in the game is Skeleton Bees, who are self-reviving skeletal versions of bees, animals who have exoskeletons in real life.
  • New Super Mario Bros. 2 serves as a debut to Bone Piranha Plants, skeletal versions of Piranha Plants. It doesn't take a botanist to figure out that a plant cannot have a skeleton.
  • Super Mario Galaxy: Kingfin, the boss of Bonefin Galaxy, is a colossal skeletal shark, whose entire body consists of bones. In real life, sharks' internal structure consists of cartilage, not bones.
• The Tricky Mod has a Funny X-Ray showing the bones of a road sign.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • In the 2009 Halloween Special "Doomy Tales of the Macabre", Homsar's hat is part of his skull.
  • When everyone gets literally scared out of their skins in "That A Ghost," Old-Timey Marzipan and Sir Strong Bad have lines of miniature femur bones in place of their respective Girlish Pigtails and evil mustache. That's actually by far the least weird thing about Marzipan's skeleton.

Webcomics

• Scurry has a mouse skull as its logo. It includes ear bones, which mice don't have. Its right ear (viewer's left) has two notches in it, very similar to the two Ear Notches that main character Wix has.

Web Original

• One particularly infamous image features two skeletons, one with bone breasts, presumably to make it clear that that skeleton is female.

Web Videos

• Every Halloween, Clint's Reptiles does a video where he reviews terrible animal skeleton decorations, such as mammals with bone-ears and invertebrates with bones.
• Conversed in the Unraveled video on Bowser's military hierarchy. Brian is confused about the skeletal nature of the Bone Pirahna Plant, remarking, "Why do Piranha Plant have bone in it?"
• This video from The Onion on how to make slow-cooked potatoes that fall right off the bone.

Western Animation

• Max of The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police has been shown to have femur-like bones in his long ears. Obviously due to Rule of Funny, but if we want to get technical, he only ever describes himself as a "lagomorph" and/or "rabbity thing", so he may not necessarily be an actual rabbit.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Frylock has a poster in his room that suggests his fries are made of bones....which contradict instances where he's braided them and lost them from chemotherapy. It's just that kind of cartoon.
• In one episode of The Busy World of Richard Scarry, Lowly Worm breaks the bones in his body and has to be put in a cast.
• 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.
• Captain Flamingo: X-rays of Milo in his Captain Flamingo outfit show him to somehow have a large bone inside the beak of his helmet.
• Disenchantment: When Bean, Elfo, and Luci find a battlefield with skeletons of many races, the elf skeletons have visible ears.
• The Fairly OddParents!: Several instances of X-Ray Sparks show Wanda having a bone in her hair swirl.
• George of the Jungle (2007): A variation; "Franken-George" featured a rhino skeleton with the horns still intact as if they are bones. Rhino horns are made of keratin.
• Get a Horse!: For an X-Ray Sparks gag, Peg-Leg Pete is shown with a bone in his hat.
• Some Mickey Mouse x-rays show plate-like bones inside his ears (or brain matter in the case of "Runaway Brain").
• Gravity Falls: Bill Cipher has a top hat that he can take off like an actual hat, but when he is shot through the hat, it's revealed to be organic and have bone in it.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Pegasus ponies have finger-like bones inside their wing feathers, as seen in "Read It and Weep" (via a medical X-ray) and "Newbie Dash" (via an X-Ray Sparks gag). This might explain why pegasi are so good at grasping and manipulating objects with their wings in the show.
• Pinky and the Brain gets a special intro for the episode "Pinky and the Brain... and Larry". When the titular mice walk past the X-ray machine, Larry is shown to have bones in his hair.
• The Simpsons:
  • When Bart and Lisa are shown as skeletons in some episodes, their hair will be included in the skeleton◊.
  • In the episode "Brother From Another Series", Sideshow Bob gets electrocuted in a flashback and the resulting X-Ray Sparks show that there are bones in his Funny Afro.
  • In The Itchy & Scratchy Show, Scratchy's skull has cat ears.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Despite being a sponge, SpongeBob has a full internal structure◊, including a spine, skeleton, and organs◊, all of which a real sea sponge doesn't have. Mostly it's Depending on the Writer as SpongeBob outright says and shows that he doesn't have any bones or organs but will be shown with some for the sake of a gag. Other invertebrate characters like Plankton and Squidward are also shown with bones, which their species don't have. This is lampshaded by a fish in one episode.
  SpongeBob: [telling a story] I emerged from my fruit-shaped bungalow fresh as a bee when a wanted cry of distress pounded against my eardrum!
  Fish: Hold it. Sponges don't have eardrums.
  Mr. Krabs: He's right.
• SWAT Kats: The cat skeletons in the graveyard have cat ears.
• Timon & Pumbaa: The elephant skeletons in "No Good Samaritan" are shown to have vertebrae-like bones in where their trunks would be when they were alive, which is jarring considering the original source got it right.

Other

• AI-generated images purporting to show the excavation of mammoth or mastodon skeletons sometimes give them singular, massive trunk bones, betraying the fact that the computer doesn't actually understand how proboscidean animals' trunks work.

Real Life

• Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva is a genetic disorder that causes muscle and other non-bony tissue to be replaced by bone, eventually restricting the person's ability to move.
• At least one set of Halloween decorations featured a pair of male and female skeletons, and it was roundly mocked online for giving the female "bone tiddies" which, obviously, real women lack. Funny thing is, women do have a broader pelvis than men which helps with childbearing, and the female skeleton in the meme appears to have that as well, making the breast bones even more unnecessary than they already were.

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