[bad-scientific-illustrations]

Source: McKnight, D.T., Bower, D.S., Ventura, C., Streeting, L.M. and Nordberg, E.J. (2026), Social clustering behavior in hatchling western saw-shelled turtles (Myuchelys bellii). J Zool, 329: 156-167. https://doi.org/10.1111/jzo.70117

Very delightful that the moral of this paper is that western saw-shelled turtles (Myuchelys bellii) like to cuddle

[bad-scientific-illustrations]

Source: Kimmig, J., & Bicknell, R. D. C. (2026). The Cambrian fecal revolution: Fueling the Cambrian Radiation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2026.06.013

[bad-scientific-illustrations]

Source: Norman, L. J., Hartley, T., & Thaler, L. (2024). Changes in primary visual and auditory cortex of blind and sighted adults following 10 weeks of click-based echolocation training. Cerebral Cortex, 34(6), bhae239

[bad-scientific-illustrations]

Source: Kawamura, Y., Oka, K., Semba, T., Takamori, M., Sugiura, Y., Yamasaki, R., ... & Miura, K. (2023). Cellular senescence induction leads to progressive cell death via the INK4a‐RB pathway in naked mole‐rats. The EMBO Journal, 42(16), EMBJ2022111133.

I will never get sick of adorable naked mole-rat illustrations

[bad-scientific-illustrations]

Source: Watarai, A., Arai, N., Miyawaki, S., Okano, H., Miura, K., Mogi, K., & Kikusui, T. (2018). Responses to pup vocalizations in subordinate naked mole-rats are induced by estradiol ingested through coprophagy of queen’s feces. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(37), 9264-9269.

I love the mole-rat zooming to get to the baby sound

[bad-scientific-illustrations]

Source: Vijayabaskaran, S., Zeng, X., Ghazinouri, B., Wiskott, L., & Cheng, S. (2025). A taxonomy of spatial navigation in mammals: Insights from computational modeling. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 106282.

[wtf-scientific-papers]

Szafrańska et al. (2020)

[wtf-scientific-papers]

Wang and Lai (2014)

[bad-scientific-illustrations]

Source: Mircheva, M., Brügger, R. K., & Burkart, J. M. (2026). Who says what when? Patterns in captive common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) volubility. bioRxiv, 2026-01

This has to be my all time favourite marmoset illustration

[bad-scientific-illustrations]

Source: McBride, Kathleen, Burton Slotnick, and Frank L. Margolis. "Does intranasal application of zinc sulfate produce anosmia in the mouse? An olfactometric and anatomical study." Chemical senses 28.8 (2003): 659-670.

Can you guess from this figure that this is in fact a mouse?