Dinosaur Coloring Pages: 80 Free Printable PDFs

Age is a better guide here than taste, because all three books cover the same creatures and only the drawing changes. The simple book is the one for three to six. One dinosaur fills the page, the outlines are marker thick, and there is nothing in the background to accidentally colour over. A child who is still learning where the line is will finish one of these and feel good about it.

The detailed book is aimed at roughly five to nine, and it is the closest thing here to what most people picture when they think of dinosaur coloring sheets. Each page is a full scene with a foreground, a middle distance and a horizon, so there is a lot to fill in and a reason to keep going. Older children and adults who colour to unwind tend to gravitate to this one too.

The cute book sits between the two and is the one nobody argues about. Rounded kawaii shapes, faces on the volcano and the raindrops as well as the dinosaurs, and pages that finish in one sitting. If you are printing for a party table or a rainy afternoon and do not know the ages in advance, print from this one.

The obvious two are here and they turn up in all three books, because every child asks for them. The detailed T rex stands at the edge of a rocky river with stepping stones running across it, and the triceratops walks through a valley of curling ferns with its three horns clearly drawn. In the cute book both shrink into chibi versions with oversized heads, and in the simple book they get a page each with nothing but a hill and a cloud for company.

Past those two the collection goes wider than most sets do. There is a stegosaurus lowering its head to a lily pond, an ankylosaurus swinging a round club tail along a rocky path, a spinosaurus with its sail up on a sandy riverbank, and a parasaurolophus with that long curved crest standing at the edge of a lake. Two velociraptors move through the ferns together, and an archaeopteryx sits on a branch with its wings half open.

The flying and swimming ones are worth pointing out to anyone who insists they are dinosaurs, because strictly they are not. The pterodactyl gliding past the sea cliffs and the long necked plesiosaur cutting through the water were reptiles living alongside the dinosaurs rather than dinosaurs themselves. It is a small thing, but it is the sort of fact a six year old will repeat for a week.

The middle book is where the cute dinosaur coloring pages live, and it commits to the style completely. Every dinosaur has an oversized round head, big shining eyes and blush ovals on its cheeks, and so does everything around it. The volcano smiles. The cupcake smiles. The raindrops falling on the dinosaur with the umbrella have faces, and so does the puddle they land in.

The pages lean domestic rather than prehistoric, which is the point of the set. A baby dino naps on top of a spotted egg, another sits in a teacup beside a smiling sugar cube, one reads a book under a lamp, and one takes a bubble bath with a rubber duck balanced on the rim. There is a swing hanging from a tree branch and a party hat with blank bunting strung above it.

These are the pages that hold up best when they are small, so if you are choosing something to colour together on a phone screen first or to pin on a wall afterwards, start here. Large open shapes, thick lines, nothing fiddly.

The detailed book is built around scenes rather than single subjects, and it keeps the world consistent. There are no houses, fences or modern animals anywhere in it, only what belongs in a prehistoric landscape: cycads and tree ferns, boulder fields, a river winding to the horizon and a volcano trailing smoke behind almost every page.

Some pages tell a small story. A row of three toed footprints crosses a mudflat towards a dinosaur in the middle distance. A large skeleton sits in the layered rock of a cliff, its ribs and tail drawn as open shapes to colour. A mother stands over a nest of round eggs, and three pages later one of those eggs has cracked open and something is climbing out of it.

If you want a page to spend real time on, the herd crossing the plain and the five dinosaurs walking one behind another are the two with the most in them. If you want atmosphere instead, try the one where a dinosaur sleeps under a broad leafy tree with a crescent moon above it.

Each book opens as a single dinosaur coloring pages pdf in the reader, so you can print one page to test a palette or run the whole set off at once. For the simple and cute books ordinary copy paper is completely fine, because those pages are mostly large open shapes and children reach for crayons and pencils, neither of which bleeds through.

The detailed book is the one worth putting on heavier stock, somewhere around 120 gsm, if markers are going anywhere near it. Its scenes pack fine lines close together and thin paper lets the ink feather across them. Colored pencils on copy paper look excellent either way, so this is only a concern if you are using markers.

Print in portrait at 100% rather than fit to page. Every design is drawn with a generous margin already, so scaling down only shrinks the areas you are trying to colour. If you are running off a stack of dinosaur coloring pages printable for a classroom, print one test page first and check your printer is not clipping the border frame.

The simple pages cut out beautifully. Colour a run of them, cut around each dinosaur, and you have a set of paper figures a child can play with, tape to a window or stick on the fridge. A row of them along a windowsill costs nothing beyond the paper.

The detailed scenes are the ones to frame, and they reward being treated as a series. Pick four or five pages, colour them in the same limited palette across a few evenings, and hang them together. Greens and warm browns for the plants with one bright colour saved for the dinosaur itself is the easiest version of this that still looks deliberate.

A nice trick with the cute book is to let a child pick colours that have nothing to do with reality. Nobody knows what colour any of these creatures were, which makes a purple stegosaurus exactly as accurate as a green one. However you use them, these free dinosaur coloring pages are free to download and print as many times as you like.