A long-necked plant-eating dinosaur standing at the water’s edge, with a volcano smoking behind the hills. The tall page gives the neck room to stretch all the way to the top, and the rocks, the river and the forest behind leave plenty of space to work in. Download and print the PDF free — no registration required.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
There is something strange about a neck that long, isn’t there?
A giraffe has a long neck too — but this animal was on another scale altogether.
Does it surprise you that animals this size once walked around on the same planet?
Why do you think the dinosaurs died out?
Which dinosaur is this?
The drawing is a general long-necked plant-eater rather than one named species. Dinosaurs built like this — small head, very long neck, pillar-like legs, long tail — are called sauropods, the group that includes Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus and Apatosaurus. Colour it as whichever of them is your favourite; the shape fits them all.
How could a neck that long possibly work?
Lightness is most of the answer. The neck bones of sauropods were hollowed out by air sacs connected to the lungs, so the neck weighed far less than its size suggests, and the head on the end was small — these animals stripped leaves and swallowed them whole instead of chewing. How high they habitually held the neck is still debated: some researchers picture it raised for high branches, others held out more horizontally to sweep across low ground.
Why is there a volcano in so many dinosaur pictures?
Mostly because it looks dramatic: the smoking volcano is an illustrator’s convention rather than an everyday scene from the age of dinosaurs. There is a grain of truth behind it, though. Enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now India were under way towards the end of the Cretaceous, and how much they contributed to the extinction, alongside the asteroid impact, is still argued over.
