This piece rounds up five of the most memorably absurd dinosaur-themed cartoons by Gary Larson, creator of the long-running American newspaper strip The Far Side. Larson, who drew alongside contemporaries such as Calvin and Hobbes in the 1980s and 1990s, was known for compressing an entire joke into a single panel, often using dinosaurs and other extinct or anthropomorphised creatures for surreal social satire rather than straightforward humour.

The article highlights comics including one depicting dinosaurs smoking cigarettes as a dark joke about self-inflicted extinction, another imagining humans as prey had they coexisted with dinosaurs (despite the two never actually overlapping, separated by roughly 180 million years), and a strip mocking convoluted dinosaur names that coined the term "thagomizer" for the Stegosaurus's tail spikes. Remarkably, palaeontologists have since adopted "thagomizer" informally as genuine scientific shorthand, a rare instance of a comic strip term entering academic usage.