Homunculus Loxodontus was created by Dutch sculptor Margriet van Breevoort in 2016 for a competition organized by the Leiden Sculpture Foundation, with the theme of biological sciences. The Leiden University Medical Center commissioned the work and installed it outside their children's hospital in May 2016. The sculpture depicts a gray, legless creature with the head of a northern elephant seal, a round larval body, and human arms folded calmly in front of it, seated on a waiting room chair. Van Breevoort designed it to represent the quiet patience of hospital patients waiting for a diagnosis, intending to convey that one should wait calmly with hope for the best. The sculpture became so popular it was voted the favorite by the public and purchased permanently by the hospital, where it remains on display inside the medical center today.

The Zhdun meme began spreading in January 2017 when a Russian-speaking tourist photographed the sculpture in Leiden and posted it to the Russian social platform Pikabu, where it immediately went viral. Russian internet users named it Zhdun (ЖДУН), a fabricated noun from the Russian verb "zhdat," meaning "to wait," so Zhdun literally means "one who waits." The image quickly spread into photoshop memes, appearing inside famous paintings, historical photographs, and political scenes. The name Snorp originated on Tumblr on January 31st, 2017, when user hellyesbro captioned a reblogged image with "adjusts microphone / Snorp," earning over 35,000 notes and popularizing the name in English-speaking communities. Reddit communities independently settled on the name Wosh. All four names, Homunculus Loxodontus, Zhdun, Snorp, and Wosh, refer to the exact same beloved internet meme character.

Yes! In March 2025, a Russian feature film titled Zhdun v Kino (translated as "Snorp: My Alien Friend") was released, making Snorp one of the rare internet memes to receive a full theatrical film adaptation. The movie features the Homunculus Loxodontus character named Zhdun, voiced by Karen Arutyunov, as an alien who crash-lands on Earth and is sheltered by a family that finds him. The plot involves Zhdun searching for a specific mineral (revealed to be salt) while a scheming technology company attempts to steal his spaceship for their own gain. The film marked a major milestone for the Zhdun meme and Snorp meme communities, celebrating the character's journey from a Dutch hospital sculpture to a globally recognized icon of internet culture.

The Homunculus Loxodontus meme resonated so widely because it captures a deeply universal human experience: waiting. Whether it is waiting at a doctor's office, waiting for a bus, sitting through a long meeting, or waiting for a game to load, the image of this calm, resigned, slightly bored creature sitting with its arms folded is immediately relatable to people across every culture and language. The creature's alien, otherworldly appearance combined with its completely human posture of patient suffering struck a perfect comedic balance. The versatility of the Wosh meme and Zhdun meme format, where the creature is photoshopped into any situation involving waiting or awkwardness, extended its reach far beyond its Russian origins, making it a genuinely global internet meme beloved from Russia to the United States to Japan.

Homunculus Loxodontus combines the features of multiple animals with distinctly human elements. The creature's large, droopy, whiskered head is modeled after a northern elephant seal, which belongs to the family Phocidae. Its round, elongated, legless body resembles the larval stage of various insects, giving it a grub-like, soft appearance. Its arms, however, are distinctly human, folded calmly in front of the body in a gesture of patient waiting. The name itself hints at this hybrid nature: "Homunculus" is Latin for "little human," and "Loxodontus" is derived from the Greek words for "oblique" and "tooth," a reference to elephant anatomy. Sculptor Margriet van Breevoort blended these biological references intentionally as part of the biological sciences theme of the 2016 Leiden Sculpture Foundation competition, resulting in the uniquely memorable and endlessly meme-able creature known as the Zhdun plush, Snorp plush, and Wosh plush.