Philosoraptor is an advice animal image macro series featuring an illustration of a Velociraptor paired with captions depicting the dinosaur as being deeply immersed in metaphysical inquiries or unraveling quirky paradoxes. Origin

On October 8th, 2008, the original illustration of the Philosoraptor was released and copyrighted by creator Sam Smith as a T-shirt design for sale on the online retailer Lonely Dinosaur.

In an e-mail exchange with Know Your Meme, Smith revealed that the idea for Philosoraptor image was conceived sometime in the early of summer of 2008. The final image wasn't created until late summer and the t-shirts went into production in August and September that year.

The image itself was a mix of several images of velociraptors I got online, which I compressed to one-color images, then mixed together. I took the jaw off of one at the mouth, and cut it open to make the mouth look like it was hanging open. The claw was based off an image of an eagle talon that I flattened, drew in some bits, and moved and enlarged one of them to make the raptor-like claw. The last thing I did was nudge the eye slit over to the right like three times, and that pulled it all together- really gives him that far-away look.

It was inspired by our friend Devin, who was a philosophy major and was always hunched over his desk thinking, so we called him the philosoraptor. We had never heard of it before at the time, but apparently the joke had been made previously on the interwebs. On 4chan

On March 30th, 2007,[3] the earliest known depiction of a Philosoraptor dinosaur was posted on YTMND page titled New species of dinosaur discovered!, featuring a photoshopped image of a Velociraptor from the 1993 action film Jurassic Park holding a copy of Plato's complete works (shown below, left). On February 18th, 2009, the earliest archived appearance of an image macro featuring the Lonely Dinosaur illustration was posted on 4chan /b/ board.