Twitterers Lash Out at Steven Spielberg for Killing an Innocent Dinosaur

Liron Samuels

Liron Samuels is a wildlife and commercial photographer based in Israel. When he isn’t waking up at 4am to take photos of nature, he stays awake until 4am taking photos of the night skies or time lapses. You can see more of his work on his website or follow him on Facebook.

TillyTweetWe’ve seen this before; hunters kill helpless animals and then hurry to have a photo taken with their ‘trophy’. Sometimes an unlucky hunter’s photo gets shared enough that it gains the internet’s attention and all hell breaks loose.

The bigger and more endangered the animal, the more respected these hunters are among their scumbag peers; but the criticism and hate messages they receive increase as well.

Keeping that in mind, imagine what happened when Chris Tilly jokingly posted a photo of Steven Spielberg next to a triceratops prop and blamed him for killing the ‘defenceless animal’.

When Tilly tweeted the rather famous photo from the 1993 Jurassic Park movie set, I assume he was just looking to have some fun ahead of the release of the latest installment in the series.

Little did he know that many people (and I mean waaay too many) would entirely miss out on the joke and really believe Spielberg just slaughtered the gorgeous creature a mere 65 million years, give or take a few million, after it went extinct.

Tilly shared the response below as one of his favorites:

https://twitter.com/FemmErica/status/608485141560864768

Among the many tweets name-calling Spielberg (I like to think they didn’t recognize him) and calling BS on the animal being defenseless with those “giant horns and a beak”, was one in particular that is either very funny or very sad:

For those who don’t recognize the name, Joyce Carol Oates is an award-winning author and was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. The jury is still out on whether or not she was joking, but it doesn’t seem like she was.

Not willing to allow Spielberg to get away with some of his other cruel activities, photos from the Jaws movie set and E.T. have since showed up as well.

With his tweet going viral, Tilly has received every kind of response possible: some against the killing of extinct dinosaurs, some against the dumb people who believe Spielberg killed the animal and some actually explaining to him that it’s just a movie prop, in case he was unaware of the fact.

“I now no longer know if I’m being trolled, if people are in on the joke, if it’s causing genuine anger, or if society is simply doomed”, he later wrote.

William Jersey commented that “its the perfect example of how quick people are to outrage versus research”, and generally I’d agree; we often see misinformed outrage over the internet. On the other hand, should people really have to research anything to know that dinosaurs haven’t been here for quite a while now?

“The outrage here should be the misuse of the word “selfie””, said Tråvīšßäxtęr, and while that was my initial thought as well, I can’t help but wonder if the education system hasn’t become extinct as well.

By the way, obviously I don’t believe that the triceratops is real and that Spielberg actually killed it, but did you notice that there are no triceratopses in the Jurassic World trailer?

Incredibly enough the same thing happened last year on Facebook.


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Liron Samuels

Liron Samuels

Liron Samuels is a wildlife and commercial photographer based in Israel. When he isn’t waking up at 4am to take photos of nature, he stays awake until 4am taking photos of the night skies or time lapses. You can see more of his work on his website or follow him on Facebook.

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13 responses to “Twitterers Lash Out at Steven Spielberg for Killing an Innocent Dinosaur”

  1. Robert Guimont Avatar

    Chris Tilly is correct, “…or if society is simply doomed”

  2. Ronny Tertnes Avatar

    years old… not newsworthy…

    1. Alex Minkin Avatar

      Years old, and people still fall for it

  3. Chris Hutcheson Avatar

    Of course there are no triceratops in the trailers, Spielberg killed the last one.

  4. doge Avatar
    doge

    garbage post.

  5. Thomas Jakob Brablec Avatar

    Come on, DIYPhotography, how is this worthy of writing about? It’s been “reported on” (if you even want to call it a “report.” which it isn’t) a million times before, years ago. It’s not exactly the type of article I like to see on your website, but I’ve seen really meaningless articles on your website before. Linking an old article on this would have been enough to joke about.

  6. Christine Welsh Avatar

    No surprise. . People, even educated ones… can be stupid. lol
    Go Spielberg!

  7. Ralph Hightower Avatar
    Ralph Hightower

    The creationists are probably having a field day with this with The Flintstones living with dinosaurs; they even had a pet dinosaur named Dino.

  8. LensLord Avatar

    I actually liked this old conversation coming up again today.

    Today, I had a friend that I asked to be more clear about a piece of satire he was quoting, because I am also getting tired of people believing crap and repeating the crap as if it were true. … My friend got really angry with me. He thought that I was thinking that everyone else is stupid. … I do not think everyone is stupid, just a few of everyone. ;-)

    In the thread of our conversation, I posted a link to this story about the Triceratops. This story helped make my point clear. … I guess, on the internet, satire without context is like emotions without emoticons, we just cannot as easily parse satire from plain text as we could if the satire were in the context of a stand up comedian.

    1. Rob C Avatar

      Just tell ’em Steve is as old as a Dinosaur, (thus old enough to have killed one); and that you don’t follow that ‘old people stuff’, so leave you out of it.

      If they find that a satisfying answer then you’re done explaining; if they find out later that they are a fool they will never tell you, yet you will always know.

      They will learn not to play with you and be a fool.