joke, apocrypha, or eggcorn?

[Laurence Horn]

So I got this charming story from an e-mail joke subscription list,
which I thought smelled a bit apocryphal:

Brenda's six-year-old daughter was explaining to the other
kids what "extinct" meant:

"Well," she said in all seriousness, "it means that the
dinosaurs are all dead and have been dead so long they don't
stink anymore. That's why they call them exstinked."

But just in case, I searched on "exstinked", and found 3640 raw hits,
although Google does helpfully ask if I meant "extinct".  Judging
from the pages I checked, all involving not only dinosaurs but dodo
birds, Tasmanian tigers, and other critters going "exstinked" and
debating the reasons for it (often on WikiAnswers) or arguing about
whether it would be OK to bring back critters that have become
"exstinked", it seems to be a common enough naive reanalysis.
Obviously, "extinct" is opaque--but is "exstinked" as transparent to
those who spell it that way as it was to the six-year-old girl above?
Do some, many, or most such spellers really suppose an olfactory
basis for the etymology?  Inquiring minds want to know!

LH

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