The Dinosaur with Hair: How my meme went viral without me

UPDATE: They Greg James just talked about my meme on BBC radio 1!
Wow.

So you’ve probably seen this image now in some form or another. It’s been shared on the internet well over a million times now, and it seems to be everywhere. Well, I made the original image! Here is the story of that image, how it evolved, and how my most successful creation hardly got me any followers. 

I was awake late at night, learning about dinosaurs on Wikipedia (because I’m cool like that), and I saw a quite funny picture of a dinosaur called Lufengosaurus, looking all shifty. I thought it would be funny to add some hair to it in Photoshop. I sent the image to a couple of friends, then went to bed and forgot about the whole thing. I also made an even more bizarre version, mainly just trying to be a surreal as possible:

A few weeks later, in early December, I saw my image on my laptop, and finally thought of a good caption. I finished the image and added my watermark to the bottom right hand corner, then posted the image on my Facebook page and shared it in a dinosaur meme group I’m in, where it got a few hundred likes.

The next morning,  I woke up to a message from an old school friend, saying he’d seen my image on Instagram, with 100,000 likes. 

Over the course of that day, the image got more and more likes (170K last time I checked). Which would be great… except some terrible person had edited it to remove my watermark! Shithead Steve didn’t reply to any of my messages asking him to credit me. But even if he had, it was too late. The image had gone viral.

Over the next few weeks the image spread out across the internet, shared by many pages I myself am a fan of. 

By the time it was posted by BBC3 and 9Gag (where it’s got 67K likes, 10K comments and 10K shares already), the image had evolved again. Repeated screenshotting had made the text hard to read, so someone added a bigger version of the text. The image now looked like this, with credit being give to some random person called “chance” (whose tweet now has 550K likes and 170K shares):

Every day since then, my friends have been tagging me in the image, and sending messages telling me they saw it somewhere new. I’ve even had people share it with me, not realising it was originally mine! I’ve given up trying to get credit now; It’s not worth the effort. The meme is wild and free. I’ve gone viral before, it’ll happen again. And it’s cool to know that something I made has become such a well known meme.

The most recent version I’ve seen has evolved even more: now both the text and the image have been remade,  begging the question if it’s even still my meme. 

But don’t worry, I’ve learnt a lesson from all this. I will be marking my memes more clearly in the future. It’s hard to make a watermark that can’t be removed without making it to intrusive in the image, but I think I’ve found that balance.

I’ve also seen Spanish and Portuguese versions of the meme around. And perhaps best of all, some people have been taking my meme and parodying it, as a new sub-genre of meme (the surest sign of a meme’s success). Here are a few of my favourites: