Philosoraptor

Where it came from
Started as a 2008 T-shirt design by Sam Smith, then got adopted as an image macro by 4chan around 2009 and spread everywhere from there.
A velociraptor stands in profile with one clawed hand raised to its chin, deep in thought like a tiny scaly Rodin sculpture. You slap impact-font text on it posing a fake-profound paradox or a stoner shower-thought question. "If you expect the unexpected, doesn't that make the unexpected expected?" "Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?" The whole bit is the dinosaur taking these dorm-room non-questions extremely seriously.
This was the official meme of pretending to blow your own mind. It ran on the kind of pseudo-philosophy that feels deep at 2am and embarrassing by morning, and the joke was always half-ironic — nobody actually thought "what if our colors look different to each other" was a real insight. It was everywhere from 2009 to about 2012, the golden age of advice-animal image macros, sharing a shelf with Courage Wolf and Socially Awkward Penguin.
It's dead. Hard dead. Philosoraptor is a fossil from the era when memes were a stock character plus white impact text, and that entire format went extinct when Twitter and reaction images took over. You'll only see it now in "remember 2010 internet?" nostalgia posts, which is fitting for a meme whose whole thing was overthinking.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends


