Friendly Dinosaur Coloring Page

About this coloring page

A smiling tyrannosaur standing among three simple ferns. Dinosaurs are the subject children request most persistently and the one where nobody can correct their color choices, which is a genuinely useful combination. Nobody knows what color a tyrannosaur was, so a purple one is not wrong, and telling a child that before they start changes how they approach the page. The body is one large shape with the belly separated, so a two-tone dinosaur happens easily. The ferns give somewhere to put green once the animal itself is done, and the teeth are the only small shapes, best left white. Printed at A4 the dinosaur fills the sheet with a clean margin and the tail reaches close to the edge, so print with a margin rather than borderless if the picture is going to be trimmed. On ordinary paper all three of crayon, pencil and felt tip behave, though a thick marker will cover the teeth. A dinosaur coloring sheet is one to print in quantity: children who like dinosaurs rarely want only one.

Color suggestions

• Green body, cream belly
• Or purple, blue, anything at all
• Darker stripes along the back
• Green ferns, brown ground

Did you know?

• Birds are dinosaurs in the strict sense. They descend from small feathered theropods, which makes a sparrow a closer relative of tyrannosaurus than tyrannosaurus was to stegosaurus.
• Nobody knows what color most dinosaurs were, but not all of them are a mystery: fossilised melanosomes in a few feathered species have been analysed to show ginger, black and iridescent colors.