Stock Femur Bone

"Do bones really look like that?!?!?! Perhaps in cartoons, but not around these parts, pal. This, my friend, is the fossilized remains of one of the treats that were used centuries ago in order to domesticate the local wild animals."

— Spore, the description of a Fossilized Domesticated Animal Treat.

In media, whenever a bone that isn't a skull or hip shows up, it's a very good bet it will be the classic femur bone, a straight rod with two evenly-sized bulbs at either end, ignoring the Real Life diversity of ribs, scapulas, clavicles, vertebrae, and all the other diverse bones that hold the body in shape. Possibly justified by the femur being the largest, strongest, straightest bone in the body, so it's instantly recognizable, often well preserved, and useful for everything from improvised clubs to dog chew toys to macabre furniture supports.

In media, those femur bones are often symmetrical from both sides, although they aren't like that in Real Life - the top of the femur has one side - the side which connects to the hip, called the femoral head - much more pronounced than the other, essentially being one very noticeable knob connected to a neck which hooks up to the rest of the bone. This is also known as "Cartoon Bone".

In lighthearted works, these are often visible when using X-Ray Sparks. See also Nothing but Skulls and Cartoon Meat.

Not to be confused with an actual animal femur bone used to cook stock.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Midnight Horror School: The whole school is decorated with bones.
• Doraemon: Nobita uses this kind of bone in "The Human Piggy Bank" in an attempt to get the Guard Dog Bank to give him his money. It doesn't work.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: In Season 7 episode 1, the bone the ambassador of Planet Miao offers to the president of Planet Xing Xing is a typical cartoon depiction of a bone.
• Lamput: Lamput morphs into the shape of a stock femur bone in one episode while he is being held by Fat Doc right next to a dog. Predictably, the dog starts to chase after Fat Doc thinking Lamput is a real bone.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Mighty Little Defenders: In episode 6, the house of the dog tribe's leader has a big wooden bone of this kind on top of it.

Comic Books

• Pocket God: Ooga, Klik, Sun, and Kinsee wear this type of bone in their hair. The other pygmies wear more distinct bones.

Films — Live-Action

• Pirates of the Caribbean: Each film in the franchise has a variation on the skull and crossbones as its logo: a skull in front of two crossed swords, torches, etc. The third film's logo uses the traditional femur bones, photorealistic but still more symmetric than typical in nature. The fifth film also uses bones, but more natural looking.

Live-Action TV

• Mystery Science Theater 3000 uses this as a recurring symbol. The Satellite of Love is shaped like a cylinder with two geodesic domes on each end. After Mike takes over as the new host, a bone symbol takes the place of the Gizmonic Institute's "G" logo on the door to the theater. In the Netflix revival, Kinga Forrester's logo is a skull with two femur bones sticking out of the cranium.

Professional Wrestling

• Mainly seen in Dantés Lucha Factory and CMLL, El Barbaro Cavernario is prone to wearing a giant femur bone in his hair.

Theme Parks

• The Pirates of the Caribbean rides at Disney Theme Parks are filled with skeletons that avert this for the most part, including the talking "skull and crossbones" mascot - the bones are replaced by cutlasses. However, the skull is wearing a black pirate hat with a classic Jolly Roger emblem on the front. Later in the ride there is another skull and crossbones over the bed of the skeleton pirate captain; its crossbones are fairly realistic, but tend towards this trope.

Video Games

• Among Us: Whenever a crewmate gets killed by the impostor, their body (or at least the remaining lower half) will have a single, large femur bone sticking out where the spine should be.
• The Binding of Isaac: The skully enemies throw this as their attack. If you aquire the Compound Fracture item, your character's tears will be replaced by stock femurs that break when they hit an enemy. Also, the Forgotten uses one as a melee weapon when he's in skeleton form, as the ghost form uses normal tears.
• Castlevania: Bone-throwing skeletons throw classic cartoon bones.
• Crash Twinsanity: In the cut content, Dr. Neo Cortex was going to go inside Coco's brain for the level "Gone a Bit Coco". The x-ray of her skull shows that her ponytail has a femur-like bone as support.
• Death Road to Canada has femur bones as a melee weapon, found either lying around or randomly from destroying skeletons. It's not exactly high-damage and has a high chance to break, so it's more of an Emergency Weapon for when your main melee weapon breaks, or saved as a bribe to get dogs to join you on the road. Contrary to the usual trope, the Femur is anatomically accurate, with a prominent femoral head.
• Decap Attack: The enemies have femur bones flying out of them when they die.
• Deus Ex has skulls, femurs, and no other bones scattered in the Paris catacombs.
• Escape the Museum: One of the first hidden-object pages is a search for ten femur bones. Ironically, they are anatomically accurate human femurs, but are scattered around an exhibit of dinosaur skeletons.
• Fate/Grand Order: The Evil Bone ascension material is a red femur bone.
• Joe & Mac throw femurs as one of their weapon types. Notable in that they're not symmetric, resembling real femurs more than the classic cartoon femur. The icon for the weapon is stock, however.
• Limbo of the Lost: You have to feed some monster dogs using bones of a skeleton. All fine, until you find that this specific skeleton has three femurs.
• Minecraft: Skeletons drop simple, stylized femur bones when killed.
• Mortal Kombat: In some of the games, certain fatalities cause the victim to explode in a shower of femurs and rib cages.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (NES) has the player collecting bones of Freddy Krueger to bury them. However, every single bone is the classic femur bone and Freddy has a lot of them (something James Rolfe mentions during his review of the game).
• Pokémon:
  • Marowak and Cubone wield large femurs as clubs, and the Thick Club item is in turn shaped to resemble them.
  • The Rare Bone item from the Sinnoh Underground is a simplified femur with symmetrical, rounded heads.
• Runescape: Most of the enemies that drop bones seem to drop femur bones exclusively. Even snakes! Only a few of the enemies drop different bones.
• Secret of Evermore: This becomes your first weapon after arriving in Prehistoria.
• Skullgirls: If Valentine loses by time out, she explodes into a pile of femurs and ribcages as a reference to Mortal Kombat.
• Solatorobo: These are used like cigars among Caninu. There are even different styles of holding them in your mouth, such as "Wild" and "Sexy".
• Super Mario Bros.: Dry Bones — a type of common skeletal enemies — throw cartoony femurs at you as a ranged attack starting with their appearance in Super Mario World, as do their palette swaps in the Paper Mario games.
• Team Fortress 2: In the "Meet the Soldier" trailer, the Medic's severed head has a femur where the spine should be.
• Undertale: The various bone attacks from skeleton brothers Sans and Papyrus look like femur bones. Papyrus even enjoys giving them as gifts.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends: Whenever a character has a bone sticking out, it's usually a femur.
• Strong Bad Email: In "disconnected", Strong Bad imagines what he would do if his head were ever disconnected from his body (and both somehow managed to continue living). His body is shown as having a femur bone sticking out of its neck instead of a spinal column.

Web Original

• Fighting Simulator 3: Bones dropped from Skeletons look like this, which gets lampshaded in the description.
  Bone description: A single bone. Why do bones always look like that, anyway?

Webcomics

• Awkward Zombie does a World of Warcraft comic wherein a rogue jumps off a cliff, counting on their mad rogue skillz to cushion their fall, but realizes mid-fall that this won't help the skeletal horse he's mounted on. On landing, the horse collapses into a pile consisting mainly of stylized femurs. As The Rant points out, Look at all those femurs that horse has!

Western Animation

• A Charlie Brown Christmas: Snoopy has a big pile of these in his bowl; he eats them as he reads the newspaper. He doesn't chew on them, or gnaw the meat off of them — he eats the bones.
• Classic Disney Shorts: These are often gnawed on and buried by Pluto. One cartoon, however, subverts it by having him unearth an accurately drawn femur.
• The Flintstones: Dino has giant, dinosaur-sized femur bones to chew on.
• The Magic Key: In “Code Calling”, the mystic Morbid throws a bunch of small femur-shaped bones to determine the future. Floppy the dog can’t resist stealing them.
• Mickey Mouse (2013): One episode has Mickey, Donald and Goofy get their skin blown off by a plane propeller, revealing skeletons that are mostly made up of cartoon femurs.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pegasus wings are often depicted as being supported by bones, which usually take the form of cartoonish femurs. In "Read It and Weep", an x-ray of Rainbow Dash's wing shows it being made up mostly of Stock Femur Bones. In "Newbie Dash", when Rainbow is hit by a lightning bolt, the X-Ray Sparks likewise show her feathers as each being supported by three thin cartoon femurs.
  • "Gryphon the Brush-Off": Pausing or going frame-by-frame during the part where Gilda falls for Pinkie's hand buzzer prank reveals that her entire skeletal structure, save for her skull, ribcage, spine, and (possibly) pelvis, is made up of these◊, resulting in a very funny-looking skeleton whose finger, claw and feather bones are all cartoon femurs of various sizes.
  • "School Raze, Part 2": Rarity uses a gigantic cartoon femur to distract Cerberus.
• The Pink Panther: "Extinct Pink" has Pink happen upon such a double-ended bone, which he intends to eat. However, the big-nose man, a theropod and a carnosaur also desire this bone, which becomes the prize in a free-for-all game of Keep Away.
• Lampshaded in the Rick and Morty Vat of Acid episode: Rick and Morty have jumped into a vat of acid to fake their deaths from alien mobsters, when one throws an alien rat in (to make sure it's really a vat of acid, and not, say, a vat of jacuzzi-heated Mountain Dew with a secret compartment full of fake bones that float to the top). Rick grabs the rat, opens the "SPARE BONES" compartment, pulls one out, and begins dutifully carving little rat bones. Unfortunately, the mobsters criticize them, saying the bones look "cartoony, like a bone you'd see in an art class".
• The Simpsons: Sideshow Mel has a simple, symmetrical and stylized femur stuck in his hair.
• Spongebob Squarepants: In one episode, Patrick eats some explosive chewing gum. Results are predictable, right down to having a femur where his spine should be (if starfish had spines, that is).

Real Life

• Dog biscuits are shaped this way to show that they're for dogs, and dogs eat bones, dontcha know.

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