Three round-faced baby dinosaurs standing together in a forest clearing, drawn with simple shapes and big friendly eyes. The outlines are clear and the areas to fill are large, so this page suits younger children who are still learning to stay inside the lines. Download and print the PDF free — no registration required.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
What picture comes to mind when you think of the age of dinosaurs?
Did you like dinosaurs as a child? Which one was your favourite?
Have you ever seen a dinosaur skeleton at a museum?
How does it feel to hear that the birds outside the window are descended from dinosaurs?
Why did the dinosaurs die out?
About 66 million years ago an asteroid roughly ten kilometres across struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The heat of the impact, the dust and soot thrown high into the atmosphere and the sudden swings in climate that followed brought the age of the dinosaurs to an end. Huge volcanic eruptions in India were also under way at the time, and researchers still discuss how the two worked together. One branch of the family came through it: the birds.
How long did the age of dinosaurs last?
The first dinosaurs appear about 230 million years ago, in the Triassic, and the last of the non-bird dinosaurs disappear 66 million years ago — roughly 165 million years in all. Our own species has been here for something like 300,000 years, so the dinosaurs’ run was hundreds of times longer than ours has been so far.
Is it really true that birds are dinosaurs?
Yes. Birds evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs in the theropod group — the same broad branch that includes Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. Feathered dinosaur fossils found over the past few decades, many of them in China, show that feathers were around long before flight was, which is why birds are often described as living dinosaurs.
