Mosasaurus Coloring Pages

What was a mosasaurus?

A mosasaurus was a giant reptile that lived in the sea at the end of the age of dinosaurs, until about 66 million years ago. It was not a dinosaur: mosasaurs were sea-going lizards, related to today’s monitor lizards and snakes. Instead of legs they had four paddle-shaped flippers, and fossils show that their tails bent down into a fin, a little like a shark’s. They breathed air, so they had to come up to the surface to take a breath, and they gave birth to live babies in the water rather than laying eggs on land.

How big was a mosasaurus?

The biggest mosasaurus grew to around 12 metres (40 feet) or more — about as long as a school bus, which is exactly what the size comparison page shows. Its long jaws were lined with sharp cone-shaped teeth, and it ate fish, squid-like ammonites, sea turtles and even other sea reptiles.

Cute mosasaurus coloring pages

The five easy pages have big shapes and bold lines for young children: a smiling mosasaurus swimming past two little fish, a kawaii baby mosasaurus hugging a fish, a mosasaurus curled round three fish friends, one blowing bubbles and one bouncing a beach ball on its snout.

Life in the Cretaceous sea

The middle pages show the mosasaurus at home in the ancient ocean: swimming beside its baby, floating at the surface for air while pteranodons fly over, leaping out of the sea in a huge splash, snapping at a group of ammonites and chasing a prehistoric shark. There is also a giant sea turtle and a long-necked plesiosaur — two of the other big reptiles that shared its sea.

Mosasaurus fossils

The first mosasaurus fossil was a huge skull found in a chalk quarry near Maastricht in the Netherlands in the 1700s, close to the River Meuse — and the name mosasaurus means “lizard of the Meuse”. One page shows a whole mosasaurus skeleton lying in a slab of rock with a brush, a hammer and a magnifying glass, and another shows paleontologists and a young helper uncovering a skeleton at a dig site.

Detailed mosasaurus coloring pages

The five detailed pages suit older children and adults: the dig site, a realistic mosasaurus covered in diamond-shaped scales, a zentangle mosasaurus, a mosasaurus mandala of ammonites and waves, and a doodle page packed with sea reptiles, fossil skulls and shells.

Print the whole set at once

The button at the top of this page bundles all twenty into a single download, and every page comes as a PDF in both US Letter and A4.

More prehistoric and sea pages

For the land animals of the same age see the dinosaur coloring pages, and for today’s ocean there are twenty pages each in the shark coloring pages and the ocean coloring pages.