triceratopsFind to reveal
Triceratops grew three horns and a huge bony frill, and a single skull could stretch over seven feet long.
Dinosaur Word Search
Find familiar words. Discover something unexpected.
Puzzle10 words · 11×11 grid · Medium · Answer key included
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🎉 Solved — all 10 words found!
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Find a puzzle word to reveal its fact.
0 of 10 facts revealed
cretaceousFind to reveal
Cretaceous means chalky, named for chalk deposits formed from tiny marine organisms rather than from dinosaur bones.
herbivoreFind to reveal
Duck-billed dinosaurs could store hundreds of replacement teeth in their jaws, giving herbivores fresh chewing surfaces underneath teeth worn down by plants.
carnivoreFind to reveal
A Tyrannosaurus bite could crush with about 8,000 pounds of force, strong enough to splinter bone and swallow the pieces.
dinosaurFind to reveal
The word means terrible lizard, coined in 1842 by Richard Owen, though dinosaurs were not lizards at all.
jurassicFind to reveal
The Jurassic period is named after the Jura Mountains between France and Switzerland, where its limestone was first studied.
skeletonFind to reveal
Complete dinosaur skeletons are extremely rare, so many museum mounts fill the missing gaps with sculpted or cast replacement bones.
predatorFind to reveal
Scientists found a fossil mammal with young dinosaur bones in its stomach, showing some mammals ate dinosaurs instead of only fleeing them.
extinctFind to reveal
Dinosaurs didn't all vanish: birds are surviving dinosaurs, carrying the old group's story into today's gardens and city skies.
fossilFind to reveal
Tiny fossil structures helped scientists reconstruct a dinosaur's ginger-striped tail, revealing color as well as the outline of an ancient animal.
True stories · Malta, Montana
The dinosaur mummy
Near the town of Malta, Montana, a fossil hunting team in 2000 uncovered something almost nobody expected to survive: a dinosaur with its skin still showing. The plant eater, a duck billed Brachylophosaurus nicknamed Leonardo, died about 77 million years ago as a young animal. Buried fast, more than 80 percent of its body was preserved as a natural mummy, with skin, scales, foot pads, and even the remains of its last meal in its stomach. Guinness World Records later listed it as the best preserved dinosaur ever found. Scientists scanned it like a patient, reading rare clues about how these animals truly looked and lived.
I am well known through the whole of Europe.
Mary Anning
Trivia
What word do scientists use for a person who studies fossils and ancient life?
A paleontologist.
Which is older as a period: the Jurassic or the Cretaceous?
The Jurassic.
Modern birds are widely considered the living descendants of which dinosaur group?
Theropod dinosaurs.
Roughly how many millions of years ago did the non-avian dinosaurs die out?
About 66 million years ago.
What hard objects did some plant-eating dinosaurs swallow to help grind food in their stomachs?
Stones, called gastroliths.
Trivia · 1 / 5
What word do scientists use for a person who studies fossils and ancient life?
A paleontologist.
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Play →or printTrue stories · Lyme Regis, England
The girl who found sea dragons
On the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England, a young girl named Mary Anning hunted fossils to help feed her poor family. Her brother found an ichthyosaur skull in 1811, and Mary later excavated the rest of the skeleton, a dolphin shaped sea reptile from the age of the dinosaurs. In 1823 she found the first complete plesiosaur, a long necked swimmer so strange that experts at first doubted it was real. Self taught and rarely credited in her lifetime, Anning helped invent the science of paleontology. Today museums display her discoveries, and a statue in Lyme Regis honors the fossil hunter and her dog.
When the dinosaurs fell at the end of the Cretaceous, they were not a senile, moribund group that had played out its evolutionary options.
Robert T. Bakker
Find fossil, dinosaur and jurassic among the words hidden in this puzzle. Play free online or print the puzzle with its answer key.
Is this dinosaur word search free to print?
This dinosaur word search is a free printable puzzle with 10 hidden words in an 11×11 grid. Find words like TRICERATOPS, CRETACEOUS, HERBIVORE hidden across, down, and diagonally. You can play it right here in your browser — tap the first and last letter of a word — or download it as a printable PDF with the full answer key on page two. It's free for personal and classroom use, so teachers can print copies for a whole class with no sign-up and no account. Word searches like this one are a proven way to build vocabulary, spelling, and word-shape recognition, which is why they're a favourite with ESL learners, elementary classrooms, and anyone who likes a quiet puzzle with their coffee.
Print this Dinosaur word search
Sources: Leonardo the dinosaur mummy (Great Plains Dinosaur Museum) · Mary Anning: the unsung hero of fossil discovery (Natural History Museum) · Velociraptor facts (Natural History Museum) · The word dinosaur is coined, 1842 (Linda Hall Library)
Word list, facts & trivia researched and compiled by Sam Letterman — spotted a mistake? Tell us and we’ll fix it.