Thanks to Usual John for suggesting this and providing useful discussion.
How does the mention of the dino’s penguin diet prompt that change of mind about imminent danger? Of extinction? I don’t understand.
Usual John adds “Incidentally, but presumably not germane to the joke, armored dinosaurs like this one were usually herbivorous. I’m not sure what kind it is supposed to be (Johnny Hart probably did not know either, but he likely was basing it on a picture or museum specimen he had seen). Maybe a stegoceras? Not the better-known stegosaurus, since there is no thagomizer.”
“Note that this would have been before the current understanding that birds are modern dinosaurs was widely accepted and also before it occurred to anyone that (non-avian) dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
The only thing that comes to mind here is that penguins live in climates that are too cold for cold-blooded creatures. But that raises the question of how his species developed that diet in the first place.
Either penguins don’t exist yet or they live too far south. Thus the poor guy is gonna die out.
A Penguin is a type of chocolate biscuit in the UK (and probably elsewhere). Maybe the bird is thinking of that and all the obesity related diseases that might come from eating nothing but this type of junk food day in and day out.
Probably not. I dunno’.
The simplest answer is probably the best one: since theis dinosaur (no matter what species he may be) doesn’t live anywhere near Antarctica, he’s not going to survive on a penguin diet.
P.S. @ Stan – Even though the “Penguins” you mentioned do predate this strip, I really doubt that Johnny Hart was aware of such specifically British products in 1966.
But, somehow, the dino has managed to live this long and grow this big. It must have some kind of access to penguins currently.
Incidentally, there were penguins when dinosaurs were still around, although that seems hardly a relevant consideration in a strip where humans, dinosaurs, and the archaeopteryx all coexist.
Well, at the time of the dinosaurs, wasn’t the planet just one continent? It’s possible that he could’ve had penguins in the past, but not anymore?
Hmm. 1966? 1968 is when it was confirmed that climate change was happening and would melt the polar ice caps. If that was just a couple years later, I would assume that it was acknowledging climate change, Arctic and Antarctic warming, and predicted extinction of polar animals, so that the joke would be “penguins will be extinct, and then this dinosaur was.”
I wasn’t alive yet, but was that model being already suggested and in current cultural conversation in 1966?
@maggiethecartoonist – that’s an intriguing suggestion, but I do not think that there was much public awareness of the supercontinent Pangaea in 1966.
In actuality, Pangaea broke up before the evolution of birds, but, as I constantly have to remind myself, it is important not to confuse cartoon geology with geology.
Pangea started to break up about 200M BC. Stegocera came along about 84 million years ago, when it was mostly separated, although Antarctica was still attached to South America.
At least that’s the current understanding. Doubt that anyone, much less Johnny Hart, was up on the details in 1966.
The idea of Stegosaurs hunting penguins runs into problems of time, geography, & diets, which is probably the joke, but who knows?
Within strip-logic, regardless of actual timing of Pangaea, there is likely at least one other continent, based on Peter’s overseas correspondence.
Usual John: you don’t know for sure that there’s no thagomizer, since the end of his tail is just outside the panel.
(Yes, I had to look up thagomizer.
)
larK, although we may not be able to see the end of the dinosaur’s tail, it seems to me that what we can see is too small to support the existence of a thagomizer.
@ Usual John & larK – Besides the framing and/or tail-size considerations, this dinosaur is a semi-regular character, and has never been seen to sport a Thagomizer.
The Alvarez paper in Science, which laid out the asteroid theory about dinosaur extinction, was published in 1980, after 1966. (I initially read it as 1996)
And after 1966. Although there were asteroid theories going back to the 1950s, they were speculation, without the evidence Alvarez found.
The asteroid kind of ruined the classic Far Side comic:
It took a while for “Global Warming” to come to the fore in public awareness. During the 1970s many people thought that GLOBAL COOLING would be the next catastrophe. This belief was reflected in pop culture of the era, despite actual scientific study pointing to the contrary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/
https://flashbak.com/when-hell-freezes-over-remembering-the-pop-culture-ice-age-panic-of-the-1970s-27091/
It’s kind of a pity that the BC strip predates the whole Global Cooling fad by several years so it can’t have been influenced by it.
This is late, but after seeing the strip again just now, I wonder whether “eminently” would have been the better word in the fourth panel.