Here's Why People Are Saying You Shouldn't Google "What Dinosaur Has 500 Teeth?"
Updated Feb. 21 2021, 2:49 p.m. ET
Practical jokes/gags have varying levels of humor, but some people mistake "hate" for "edge." There's a big difference between saying something because you're struggling with a personal topic or issue and are trying to make a great point/punchline out of that struggle, and just attempting to say something that's mean because you want to try and justify having an awful personality.
This trending internet gag — which asks folks "what dinosaur has 500 teeth?" — falls into the latter category.
The answer to "what dinosaur has 500 teeth" is a plot to try and get people to saying the N-word.
The 110 million-year-old dinosaur, Nigersaurus Faqueti, is an herbivorous sauropod that lived during the middle cretaceous period alongside the suchomimus, "supercroc", and other herbivores like the ouranosaurus and lurdusaurus.
The Nigersaurus had a really long neck and a whopping 500 "slender" teeth — which were all replaceable — according to paleontologist Paul Sereno.
People are seemingly obsessed with this 30-foot long prehistoric creature because they're hoping that those who look up the dino will mispronounce its name and accidentally say the N-word. You know, because apparently there are tons of folks on the internet who have the same sense of humor as a bunch of racist seventh-graders who scream into their Xbox Live headsets after getting no-scope headshotted in Halo.
The "what dinosaur has 509 teeth" question first gained popularity in a 2019 Reddit thread.
Several other threads have turned the very act of searching the dinosaur online into a meme. People have called it "the most politically incorrect dinosaur ever" while others stated that "Africanamericanasaurus is a mouthful."
In one of the threads, several people tried to correct peoples' pronunciations of the dinosaur — that it's "nye-juhr" — but that didn't stop commenters from making racist remarks.
The meme has become so widespread that when you enter "what dinosaur ..." into a Google search, the top suggested results all have to do with "most teeth" or the "500 teeth" meme. This fact was even pointed out in the comments section of another Nigersaurus post: "This is literally the highest suggested auto completion for “what dinosaur”. Congratulations reddit, we did it," user meanie_linguine wrote.
This is reminiscent of another "racist search" gag people have: Asking people to look up the name of H.P. Lovecraft's cat.
The famed horror writer's cat's name is literally "n*****man," and there are throngs of memes on the internet that highlight how twisted and shocking of a discovery it is to learn that Lovecraft actually gave that name to one of his pets.
There are tons of Twitter posts where people are encouraging others to look up the name of the dinosaur, or just tweeting the question themselves in the hopes of catching others off-guard with the query.
Have you been accosted with similar "gags" of this nature that get you to accidentally look up a joke that many consider to be offensive and/or racist? What's so funny about simply saying a word that's designed to degrade and humiliate someone?