Philosoraptor

About

One of the more thoughtful (and successful) Advice Dog variations, Philosoraptor challenges the reader with his deep, existential, Paleolithic questions.

Image Origin

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.

• US Copyright #(VAu000973431)

Sam Smith sent us an email to let us know he’s cool with the photoshopping, but is curious to know how it all began.

We’re not exactly sure who started putting text over it, and far be it from us to try and control a meme… We put a creative commons non-commercial license on it, so all your stuff is cool and we think what you’re doing is great, but now everyone thinks that the shirt we’re selling is just something we cut and pasted off the web, which kind of sucks for us. It’d be cool to see if we could put our side of the story out there and see if we can find the person who first put text over it, and have a complete history of origin of the meme.

Name Origin

Although the word “Philosoraptor” appears on the original t-shirt design, the word Philosoraptor has been found prior.

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

I like the philosoraptor because it spits an acidy type of substance in its victims eyes. I saw this dinosaur in the movie Jurassic Park and I did a report on it also. This dinosaur is da bomb.

Philosoraptor also appeared on Urbandictionary July 19th, 2008.

Also, there was a YTMND, http://philosoraptor.ytmnd.com/ created March 30th, 2007 yet has only been viewed under 1500 times and did not result in any kind of fad. As of December 7th, 2009 it is the only Philosoraptor YTMND. However, Template 2 of the Memegenerator Philosraptor uses the same image as this YTMND.

As is self-evident, the name “Philosoraptor” is a combination of the words philosopher and velociraptor. Because of the similar sound of the two words, it is quite likely that different people arrived at the concept of a Philosoraptor independent of one another.

4chan

One of the first archived instances of Philosoraptor on 4chan that has been archived occurred on February 18th, 2009, (two months after the trend began it’s first sharp rise) in 118114398 The Philosoraptor text is clearly visible, followed by a blank exploitable in the 2nd post.

The following month, Memegenerator.net was created, allowing these Advice Dog variations to be created without a photo-editing program.

Memegenerator.net

On Memegenerator.net, (the macro used for creating all Advice-Dog spinoffs) Philosoraptor is #7 in popularity, on the Demigod Tier, with just under 20,000 images total.

ED

Although Philosoraptor lacks an entry of its own on ED, the first Philosoraptor image to be added to the wiki was in November of, 2009.

Google Insights

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.

Related: Raptor Jesus