In my friends living room, in 2008, I created the image that would become the image of the "Philosoraptor" meme.
A few years ago in college, a friend of mine and I started an organic t-shirt company called http://LonelyDinosaur.com That year one of my roommates had been finishing his thesis in philosophy, and we started calling him the philosoraptor because he would always be hunched over his desk, pondering existence. We had joked about making it into a shirt, but the idea languished for several months because after we graduated we were selling our shirts out of a veg oil powered RV, and as it turns out, doing just about anything productive while living in an RV is utterly impossible.
One day in august of 2008, I was messing around on my computer, looking at different images of raptors, and finally tried to photoshop an image of a philosoraptor. It came out way better than I had expected, and with a few final tweeks what I had was basically what you've seen if you've seen the meme. We put it up on our website, copyrighted it in October, and it quickly became our number 1 bestselling shirt, making up almost 95% of our sales. In march, friends of ours started telling us that they had stumbled on our image, with text over it. A few people even mentioned that they didn't know that we taken the image from 4chan, assuming we must have copied it for it to be so popular. Over the past 9 months, we've watched as the meme grew, and with it, the number of snarky comments we got about ripping off 4chan, which has been a very strange experience.
In May, we decided to put a Creative Commons 3.0 license on the image, since it seemed silly to try and restrict or control a meme. We figured we'd let it run it's course, but it was still kind of frustrating be told we ripped off something that we created. A few weeks ago, I contacted Chris from KnowYourMeme.com about it, and he's done some really cool work trying to uncover the full origin of the philosoraptor meme. Now we're trying to find out who was the first person to start putting text over the image.
I created the philosoraptor image in my friend's living room. AMA.
Here is a link to KnowYourMeme- http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/philosoraptor And here's our philosoraptor page with the CC license-http://lonelydinosaur.com/apparel/philosoraptor.html