A respected scientific journal published a photo superimposing the fact of President Trump onto a clipart picture of monkey feces that was included in a study by researched from Penn State and the University of Washington. The journal’s editorial staff removed the image claiming to not have known the President’s face was there.

According to a report from The College Fix, the academic journal Scientific Reports, which focuses on research papers in the hard sciences, published a picture superimposing Donald Trump’s face on a clipart image of monkey poop.

The study, which is titled “Methylation-based enrichment facilitates low-cost, noninvasive genomic scale sequencing of populations from feces,” is a serious academic research paper by professors from the University of Washington and Penn State.

President Trump’s face appears superimposed on a tiny clip art image of monkey feces that is used to demonstrate the process of efficiently extracting feces from animal waste.

TGIF> Check it out. Researchers hide @realDonaldTrump face inside a monkey poop in a published paper. Zoom way way in on poop and look on right side in https://t.co/VD9PhtmKlc … Talk about a rotten Easter egg! pic.twitter.com/oFKyDMdG3B — Paul Knoepfler (@pknoepfler) December 14, 2018

In order to maintain the integrity of the academic journal, its editors removed the illustration upon learning that it had been modified to include Trump’s “The editors have become aware of unusual aspects to the ‘Extract fecal DNA’ illustration in figure 1. We are investigating, and appropriate editorial action will be taken once the matter is resolved.”

Neither the publisher of the journal nor the paper’s authors responded to inquiries from The College Fix about the picture. It is possible, of course, that the authors did not realize that the clip art they had selected had been modified in this way. The silhouette of Trump’s face can only be seen if the reader zooms in on the image.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for updates on this story.