What 17 year old lowland gorilla, a resident of the Cincinnati Zoo, was mythologized in many memes after being killed in 2016 in order to protect a boy that fell into his enclosure?

The term meme was introduced in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (author of "The God Delusion"). He conceived of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes and considered them as being in control of their own reproduction.