It started with a scene in the monster hit, “Jurassic World,” that resonated with zookeepers everywhere and ended with a meme that exploded on the Internet on Wednesday.
And the credit for the Internet sensation du jour goes to San Diego Zookeeper Rick Schwartz, who tweeted out a picture of a colleague at the Santa Zoo re-enacting the iconic scene in “Jurassic World” where Chris Pratt’s character calmed a trio of velociraptors down.
That scene showed the kind of training and work zookeepers around the world do with their animals, said Schwartz, who also goes by the public persona Zookeeper Rick.
But #JurassicZoo idea didn’t originate from him.
“I started noticing zookeepers — who are a tight-knit group — posting pictures (online) last night,” he said. “And I thought it was pretty neat and asked a colleague for her permission to post it up on my public page.”
And the rest is history, as they say.
The post got picked up by the Nerdist.com, a pop culture website for everything nerdy. Michelle Buchman, a social media manager at Nerdist, saw Schwartz’s and her friend’s post and started to ask for more and compiled some her favorites into a post on her website.
By the end of the day, the Internet was gaga about zookeepers taming their animals à la “Jurassic World.”
Schwartz said he hopes the attention from the meme will get “people to visit their local zoos.”
“To go see some real animals instead some CGI ones,” he said.
