Dinosaur Coloring Pages

Children who like dinosaurs like them loudly, and they want the animal doing something rather than standing on empty paper. Every one of these 45 free printable dinosaur coloring pages puts its dinosaur in a landscape: a jungle, a river bank, a plain under a volcano.

What is in the dinosaur set

• Named species: Tyrannosaurus rex, stegosaurus, ankylosaurus, spinosaurus, parasaurolophus, diplodocus, pterodactyl and a plesiosaur in the sea.
• Cute dinosaur coloring pages: rounded, smiling, drawn with thick closed outlines and no scary teeth on show.
• Dinosaur families and groups: a family walking together, three running across a plain, two meeting by a river.
• Scenes: erupting volcanoes, waterfalls, fern jungles, ponds with fish, nests of eggs.
• Patterned backs: stripes, spots and plates drawn as separate closed shapes, so a back can take two or three colors on its own.

Which dinosaurs are in the set

Counted by species across the forty-five sheets: stegosaurus five, brachiosaurus and the other long necks four, pterodactyl two, diplodocus two, parasaurolophus two, ankylosaurus two, spinosaurus one, tyrannosaurus one. Two sheets are babies with their eggs.

The long-necked dinosaurs carry the set because they fill a page better: head at the top corner, tail at the bottom, a tree in between. Eight sheets put a volcano in the background and seventeen are set in jungle, which is where the leaves and the pattern work come from.

Scenes rather than silhouettes

A dinosaur alone on white paper is finished in four minutes. Here the animal sits inside palm trees, ferns, grass tufts, rocks, clouds and a volcano, which is fifteen to twenty separate areas on top of the dinosaur itself. That is the difference between a page abandoned halfway and one that comes back finished.

The line is thick and closed everywhere, so markers do not leak from a fern into the sky, and a crayon crossing an outline still reads as inside the shape.

What color were dinosaurs?

Nobody knows, for most of them. Fossilised melanosomes have given real colors for a handful of feathered species, but for a T. rex any answer is as defensible as another. Green is tradition, not evidence, so a purple stegosaurus with orange plates is fine. It is worth saying out loud to a child who is worried about getting it right.

If you want a scheme that looks deliberate anyway: one color for the body, a second for the back plates, stripes or spots, and a third for the whole background. Three colors, and the page holds together.

Which sheets suit which afternoon

The single smiling dinosaur pages are the quick ones, done in ten minutes. The jungle and volcano scenes, the family walking and the group in the mountains each carry twenty or more elements and run past half an hour.

For more prehistoric reptiles, the plesiosaur here swims in the same water as the ocean pages, and the animal drawer covers everything still alive.

Every sheet is a free 300 dpi A4 PDF, safe on US Letter, with no account and no watermark.