Proper Anatomy

About

Proper Anatomy refers to images of animals labeled in a scientific manner, but given humorous labels. It is also referred to a Proper Goat Anatomy due to the original instance of the meme involving a goat

Origin

The first known version of this meme was a picture of a goat, labeling pointing to parts of it’s anatomy like a normal scientific anatomy diagram would. However, the image used silly terms, such as calling it’s eyes “little blinkers” the back legs “Jump sticks” and it’s ears “wiggly listeners”

The oldest surving copy of this image was posted by the Tumblr blog of Tastefully Offensive ^[1] on March 11th, 2013 and gained 5,000 notes in 2 years. Another tumbler blog, “princessofworms” later posted the image two months later on May 29th 2013 ^[2] with the text below the post saying “im a scientist and very important to know goat part”. Although this blog has since been taken down, surviving reblogs of this post indicate that it gained 100,000 notes within 2 years.

While this version of of the image has been around at least since 2013, prior to it the same image appeared on the internet with the caption “Look at this baby goat he doesn’t get in fights over the internet. Be the goat” at least since 2010^[4]

Spread

On Reddit there are multiple copies of the image ^[6], with the most popular one gaining 2,763 votes, with 90% positive ^[5]. The most popular post on Cheezburger was on the Memebase sub-site Graphjam gained 2,793 votes ^[7].

While Proper Goat Anatomy remains the most popular version, several other versions with different animals have been made. On September 7th, 2013 Tumblr user “cptmalhammer” posted a collection of 4 different proper anatomy examples, including the original Proper Goat Anatomy one in a single post. Within a year and a half this post gained over 266,000 notes.^[8] On November 16th, 2013 Tumblr user “weeaboo-chan” uploaded their own drawing of a rabbit titled “Anatomy of the Bun”. Within a year and a half this post gained over 152,000 notes^[9]