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Origin
On September 17th, 2009, Reddit user CtrlAltDelYourFace created a thread entitled “Hey Reddit, I heard you like bears and sharks, so I made you a Bear Shark. Enjoy.”
User mintyice created Bear Shark Moon
CtrlAltDelYourFace returned with BEARSHARKTOPUS
And other users created instances such s Sharkwhaltopusbear, Gentlesharkwhaltopusbear, and more.
Spread
Within mere hours, Bearsharktopus made it to the popular Tumblog The Daily What.
Days after the Reddit thread, Buzzfeed contributer Mark Mann posted Bearsharktopus to Buzzfeed where it earned the “most shared”, “LOL”, and “omg” badges.
On September 20th, the Bearshark instance sans tenticles was featured on CollegeHumor.com.
The same day, Abe of the hilarious Christian conservative blog Christwire.org featured the Sharkbeartopus with the headline Crazed Evolutionists Create Bearsharktopus.
Excerpt:
This is more proof why genetics is evil! Somehow scientists are planning to,.. splice the genomes of a the bear, a shark and an immoral Asian octopus to evolve these sea monsters against holiness!
{snip}
Stop genetics! It is an abomination to science and nature, and only serves the aggrandizing, selfish agenda of dog evolutionists like Richard Dawson. These men have no morals or scruples, and don’t know what they are dealing with in their effort to play master and creator! Burn the lab experiments and gene manipulation!
On September 22nd, 2009, Boingboing’s Cory Doctorow posted Bearsharktopus under the title Beware the Bearsharktopus.
On October 5th, 2009, the breeding of a Bearsharktopus was depicted by jmay #559 on the site scribbls.com.
Then, on October 13th, something funny happened.
GQ’s Dan Fierman posted Bearsharktopus on GQ’s “The Verge” pop culture blog in a post entitled Know Your Meme. Ironically, we hadn’t created an entry on this meme yet.
Other Bearsharks
Within the Reddit thread, many users cited references to earlier bear-shark hybrids, such as this bearshark comic from Nerdoid.com published in July of 2009.
Merchandise
The original author of the Bearsharktopus image has created T-shirts available for purchase on Bearsharktopus.com.
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