Know Your Meme: Philosoraptor

One of the more thoughtful (and successful) Advice Dog variations, Philosoraptor challenges the reader with his deep, existential, Paleolithic questions. One of the earliest mentions of a philosoraptor on the web was posted by Hope, age 10, KY, USA; December 28, 1998 on the children’s site echantedlearning.com. Hope made a referece to how awesome velociraptors are, but spelled it Philosoraptor. The Philosoraptor image actually started out as a T-shirt design on Lonelydinosaur.com. Sam Smith registered his copyright on the image on October 8th, 2008. The beginnings of the meme started on http://www.4chan.org/ where someone posted the dinosaur image with the text, "Philosoraptor" The second post in the thread was a blank exploitable. People then started posting responses having the dinosaur say things that sound profound, but are usually really dumb or funny...or both. On http://www.memegenerator.net/, Philosoraptor is #7 in popularity, on the Demigod Tier, with just under 20,000 images total. As Memegenerator memes go, the common comparison of measure is “Advice Dog”, the meme that gave memegenerator a reason for being. The largest peak in Philosoraptor queries began in December of 2008, two months following Smith’s copyright.