Students complaining about bizarre or unfathomable questions have become a staple of the exam season, and a biology GCSE paper sat yesterday did not disappoint.

It asked why Charles Darwin was drawn as a monkey in a cartoon.

Thousands of teenagers took the paper, set by the AQA exam board, with many turning to social media afterwards to voice their exasperation.

One wrote on Twitter: “There’s me revising homeostasis and the menstrual cycle when all I needed to know was why Charles Darwin was drawn as a monkey.”

Another added: “So I went to school for 12 years to do a whole paper on plants and why Charles Darwin was drawn as a monkey?? Very glad I revised hormones.”

Last year the same exam board was at the centre of a social media storm over a question about teenage drinking and testing drugs on drunk rats.

This year’s question related to Victorian cartoonists lampooning Darwin for his then controversial claim that man was related to monkeys through a common ancestor.

A spokeswoman for AQA said: “It’s completely normal for students to tweet about their exams. We only ever ask questions about things that are covered in the syllabus.”