Dinosaur Word Search

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fossil

Most fossils form when minerals slowly seep into buried bone, copying the original shape stone by stone.

dinosaur

The word means terrible lizard, coined in 1842 by Richard Owen, though dinosaurs were not lizards at all.

jurassic

The Jurassic period is named after the Jura Mountains between France and Switzerland, where its limestone was first studied.

skeleton

Complete dinosaur skeletons are extremely rare, so many museum mounts fill the missing gaps with sculpted or cast replacement bones.

predator

Meat eating predators like Tyrannosaurus had forward facing eyes that gave them sharp depth perception for judging distance while hunting.

extinct

An asteroid roughly six miles wide struck near Mexico 66 million years ago, ending the age of the giant dinosaurs.

herbivore

Big plant eaters swallowed stones called gastroliths that tumbled in the gut to grind tough leaves they could not chew.

carnivore

A Tyrannosaurus bite could crush with about 8,000 pounds of force, strong enough to splinter bone and swallow the pieces.

triceratops

Triceratops grew three horns and a huge bony frill, and a single skull could stretch over seven feet long.

cretaceous

The Cretaceous was the last period of the dinosaur age, ending 66 million years ago when the great extinction struck.

stegosaurus

Stegosaurus had a brain about the size of a walnut, tiny for an animal as long as a bus.

velociraptor

The real Velociraptor was only about the size of a turkey and almost certainly covered in feathers.

pterodactyl

Pterosaurs were flying reptiles, not dinosaurs, and the largest had wingspans as wide as a small airplane.

spinosaurus

Spinosaurus carried a tall sail on its back and probably hunted fish, spending much of its life in and around water.

In their words