[qewrffewqwfqew]

The more I look at the three snails, the more I find A and C to be similar in their pattern of illumination.

EDIT: the closer I look the more I'm convinced. C is the matte rendering of A; B is the different environment map. Figure 2 in the paper bears me out; I think the authors managed to fool themselves while editing :(.

EDIT#2: make that figure 2A & 2B that bear me out ... 2C they seem to have used the same image twice in the bottom row. Am I mad? I know these errors are easy to make in the rush to publication, but my senses disagreeing with the text in so many places is starting to freak me out!

[tominous]

I came here to make the same comment. Overlaying the images with crossed eyes, you can easily see that snails A and C share the most similar pixels. The mistake is in Figure 1 of the original paper and has been copied to the article.

[542458]

No need to guess! You're right, A and C are closest - (A-C) shows fewer differences than (B-C). Here are the diffs for the images (with C-C as a sanity check):

http://i.imgur.com/GQGLE61.jpg

As other commenters have said, C is just the highlight-free version of A, which the diffs fairly clearly show.

EDIT: For reference, here's A-B.

http://i.imgur.com/DW8TL7A.jpg

[dsjoerg]

If the paper makes these kinds of errors, how can we be sure they didn't make similar errors when conducting the experiment?

[charlieflowers]

Really, for this kind of paper, the only reasonable approach would be to figure out how to get actual babies to proofread it. Tricky.

[xutopia]

Except you have to look at it a long time and know that you're being tricked before you perceive it.