Dinosaur Coloring Pages

The dinosaurs are the actual dinosaurs

Each species is drawn with the features that tell it apart, not as one generic lizard with different bumps: the ankylosaurus has banded armour and a club tail, the spinosaurus has a sail built from eleven separate spines, the parasaurolophus has its long hollow backward crest, and the plesiosaur has four paddle flippers rather than legs. A child who colours these will be able to name them afterwards.

Bones as well as animals

Two of the new pages are the part most dinosaur sets leave out. One is a complete T. rex skeleton — skull, twenty-six vertebrae, twelve pairs of ribs, the little two-clawed arms — every bone drawn as its own shape so you can colour them separately. The other is a cutaway of a dig site: four rock layers with a curled skeleton, ammonites, teeth, a fern fossil, footprints and an egg with something still inside it, and the brushes and picks laid out above ground.

Nothing is frightening

Even the meat-eaters are drawn friendly. The T. rex smiles, the spinosaurus is fishing rather than hunting, and no page shows one animal attacking another.

Nothing is printed dark

No scale, plate, spike or claw arrives filled in, the sea under the plesiosaur is left open water rather than shaded, and the rock layers in the dig are white — so the fossils in them are yours to pick out.

The long ones

Five pages will take an adult a while: the skeleton, the fossil dig, the doodle sheet of twenty-eight, the dinosaur mandala and the patterned stegosaurus.

Printing

Print at 100% scale rather than “fit to page”, and match the file to your paper — Letter or A4. The button at the top bundles all twenty into a single download.