Spinosaurus Meets An Internet Teenager

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I do not like the modern social media-based palaeontology community. For a scientific community, it’s an abysmally toxic ash field, poisoned by predatory teenagers (if not in their early twenties) on Twitter, Discord, TikTok and the like. It was a terrible idea visiting it, and since I’ve left I’ve been healing greatly and my friends agree with me. As someone who actually loves dinosaurs with an actually fun, educative and immersive approach to palaeontology similar to many old dinosaur textbooks and other media, it’s a nightmare. Gen Z humour, which I did years ago but now highly dislike for its obnoxity as I have for a few years now, terrorise this virtual hellscape in all their general forms and variants one of them this recent immature Polygon Donut-style trend of "silly" memes you’ve might’ve seen at least several times anywhere. They trigger my quills like a porcupine, cringing my whole senses out. A lot of young artists and animators in the community I’ve met before are sadly intoxicated with them. I’m absolutely not dropping the cute animals featured in them, because they’re cute animals that don’t have a concept about these memes. It’s their horrible distribution in whatever form, often filled completely to the brim with annoying noises and songs and overused Gen Z humour jokes. I was getting sick of them already when I was first seeing them, yet I soon tried getting open-minded to them, eventually obsessing over them during summer, with a whole album of these cringey "silly" songs that even appeared in an aesthetic "edit" YouTube short about Cambrian animals I made. It was again a very bad idea returning, and those earbugs have still not even tried crawling out of my head. One of the community’s "favourite" dinosaurs would be the bizarre amphibious Spinosaurus. With a wild history of trying to piece the puzzle of this Cretaceous carnivore, each discovery has rendered it ever so weirder than we come to think, as well as landing it in controversy, not just about what terrain it favoured, but also about if it could win against a T. rex ever since the third Jurassic Park movie came out, and so much more. The dark community had made a living out of all those cultural controversies and depictions and not really about the actual animal itself, which is a trend you’ll come to see with any prehistoric animal there. You’ll often also see memes of a satirical future elephant seal-like reconstruction (dubbed "Spinofaarus"), based on how much our image of Spinosaurus had changed from just a generic sailed theropod dinosaur, to an utterly strange aquatic one, though I will admit it’s creative. It "originated" from an entry by Rodrigo Vega of a speculative Spinosaurus reconstruction for the All Your Yesterdays contest in 2013, but it has unfortunately now been distributed in terrible Gen Z humour, especially seen in the aforementioned artists. God I’m glad I don’t have to link them again.

Here’s a little old-school tongue-and-cheek cartoon comic (inspired by the likes of Gary Larson as always) I made about a calm Spinosaurus’s reaction to the matter, as it’s sleep is disrupted by a time-travelling teenager from the future who he doesn’t get, "appreciating" it a bit too differently. Dinosaurs much preferred peace and quiet, especially in their sleep. This is the first of my many prehistoric comics to come, which I hope you’ll enjoy. The annoyance’s head is blue as a reference to the blue emoji stock images commonly featured in the "silly" memes. This isn’t meant to threaten anybody, again it’s just tongue-in-cheek. Thank you.