Basic Trope: Bones are present in body parts that don't have bones.
- Played Straight: When Molly the cat is zapped with X-Ray Sparks, she has bones visible in her ears.
- Exaggerated:
- When Molly the cat is zapped with X-Ray Sparks, she's shown as a solid mass of bone.
- Every living creature is shown to have bones in every major body part — ear bones, feather bones, hair bones, leaf bones...
- Downplayed: When Molly is zapped with X-Ray Sparks, her inner ear bonesnote are inside the pointy parts of her ears, and also much larger and more visible than they should be.
- Justified:
- Molly has a rare disorder that causes her to grow bone in some of her soft tissues.
- Molly belongs to a species of animals (possibly extraterrestrial) that happens to have additional bones or to deposit dermal bone in some body parts, simply as a result of natural evolution.
- The "ear bones" are actually the cartilage in Molly's ears and are given their own outlines separate from the skull.
- The "ear bones" are skull fragments have drifted into her ears.
- Subverted: Pan to Gerald the Gadgeteer Genius, who turns off a switch labeled "cartilage" on his zapping device (which is next to another switch labeled "bones").
- Double Subverted: When Gerald insists Molly wear a diamagnetic electrophobic helmet in his lab, he discovers Molly's ears are unusually stiff and actually have bones in them. This puzzles Gerald.
- Inverted: When Molly the cat is zapped with X-Ray Sparks, she only has a handful of major bones — skull, ribs and femurs — and is missing all the others.
- Defied: Someone draws an inaccurate cat skeleton with full ear bones, and Bob says, "Oh come on, cats don't have full ear bones! In fact, name ONE animal like that!"
- Parodied:
- Molly lands headfirst from a long fall and yells "Ow, my ear bone!"
- Molly is taken to the vet, who points to her x-rays while talking about increasingly ridiculous Latin nomenclature for bones such as the ossum auricularis, processum ossificatus labialis, and greater femurus tongous.
- When Molly the cat is zapped with X-Ray Sparks, her skeleton is made entirely of Stock Femur Bones.
- Averted: When Molly the cat is zapped with X-Ray Sparks, she has a perfectly normal feline skeleton with no supernumerary or missing parts.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Sometimes Molly has bones in her ears, sometimes she doesn't.
- X-rays consistently show Molly with ear bones, but her ears can be bent like they're made of catrilage.
- When Gerald zaps a shark and accidentally zaps himself, the X-Ray Sparks show the cartilage in the shark's body, but not the cartilage in Gerald's nose and ears.
- Lampshaded: "... why does this x-ray say that you've got bones in your ears?"
- Conversed: "The artists seem to forget that ears don't have bones."
- Played For Drama:
- Molly suffers from Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva
, where soft tissue regrows as bone. - A trauma surgeon has been called in for Justified #4.
- Molly suffers from Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva
- Played For Horror: Molly is actually an Animalistic Abomination that has bones in its ears, for some reason.
