Dinosaurs

For all dinosaur-loving kids and teachers out there, our dinosaur report helps you find sites full of fun activities and information on everyone's favorite extinct reptile. Go on a virtual dinosaur egg hunt, listen to dinosaur roars, or trade "dino cards" with your friends.

Dinosaur Train from PBS offers dinosaur facts, videos, games and printable dinosaur cards. The site is designed to help young children understand paleontology as well as address natural science topics such as animal behavior, comparing and contrasting animal features, and ecology. The site includes lots of audio and video to make it accessible to pre-readers.

Dinosphere from the Indianapolis Children's Museum features activities and lesson plans for students in grades K-8, as well as ten "dino-profiles." Online activities for non-readers with lots of audio instructions include an alphabet book and a dinosaur bone puzzle. Activities for early readers and readers are also provided, and a Spanish language version is available for each.

The Discovery Channel's When Dinosaurs Roamed America features an interactive map that lets users click on an area of the U.S. and then on a time period to see realistic pictures of dinosaurs and their environments. Students can see video clips of many dinosaurs from the video gallery or enter their zip code to see that dinosaurs used to live where they do.

The BBC's Prehistoric Life section includes many resources such as Walking with Dinosaurs. Students can learn about different dinosaurs by time period, or travel back in time with the Dinosaur World game.

Dino Directory, from the Natural History Museum in England, consist of data cards with information about many dinosaurs. Cards can be viewed online, printed out, or downloaded as a spreadsheet. Teaching suggestions are included.

The Dinosauria from the University of California Museum of Paleontology provides extensive online information, including the fossil record and life history and ecology of dinosaurs, and special exhibits such as the Tyrannosaurs rex Exposition, Dilophosaurus!, and the Dinobuzz.

The Dinosaur Floor from the Center for Educational Technologies site includes geologic timelines and illustrations with dinosaur information.

Dinosaur Hall from the Academy of Natural Sciences provides a brief introduction to dinosaurs and paleontology in an alphabetical format.

Dinorama, from the National Geographic Society, leads students through an exploration of dinosaurs using a printable scavenger hunt with online information.

So You Want to be a Paleontologist? provides advice from professors and graduate students to those who would like to make dinosaur study their career.

The Encyclopedia Britannica's Web site offers Discovering Dinosaurs, a comprehensive look at environment, anatomy, behavior, and physiology. A teacher guide also is featured.

Sue at the Field Museum presents information about the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil named Sue.

T. rex: the killer question, from the British Museum of Natural History, features an online activity in which students look at evidence to decide whether T. rex was a scavenger, predator or even both.

Dino Inquiry, from North Carolina State University's Science Junction, allows students to explore a variety of dinosaur fossil bones from the Dinosaur National Monument quarry using Quicktime Virtual Reality (QTVR) panoramas and digital still imagery.

The American Museum of Natural History features Dinosaurs and Descendents, with information on its fossils of Tyrannosaurus, Barosaurus, dinosaur embryos, and more.

The Curse of T.Rex was a Nova program from PBS. This Web site includes information about the plants and other animals that existed during the time of the dinosaurs, as well as a teacher guide for use with the program.

Dinobase, from the University of Bristol, is the place to look for that hard-to-find dino. This is an extensive database of dinosaur species with a few pictures. The site also includes a printable dinosaur family tree.

Dinosaurs: Facts and Fiction from the U.S. Geological Survey provides simple answers to questions such as "What did dinosaurs eat?" and "Why did the dinosaurs die out?"

Zoom Dinosaurs is a hypertext resource written for children. It includes information sheets on 78 dinosaurs and simple printouts that can be used for coloring or other activities.

Dinosaur Eggs, from National Geographic, presents the hunt for dinosaur eggs and what we can learn from them. It includes a section on dinosaur mothers and babies and a museum of virtual reality dinosaur embryos and hatchlings.

Dinosaur Dynasty: Discoveries from China from the Field Museum of Natural History's exhibit presents a tour of their dinosaur exhibit, featuring information about a whole new set of dinosaurs from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods in China.

The Wyoming Dinosaur Center Web site includes a "research library" with information about fossils, geologic time, and the excavation and preparation of dinosaur remains.

Dinosaurs!, from Honolulu Community College, provides an easy-to-navigate, narrated tour of an online dinosaur exhibit.

Paper Dinosaurs, 1824-1969 is a history of dinosaur discovery told through the original publications of famous figures in the field. Historic essays and drawings are reproduced in this collection from the Linda Hall Library.

Dinosaur Illustrations is a guide to finding pictures of many dinosaurs on other Web sites.

The Dinosaur Hall features photographs of several dinosaur skeletons and dioramas from the Smithsonian Institution's Dinosaur Hall. In The Life of a Vertebrate Fossil, students learn what paleontologists do in each stage of collecting and analyzing a vertebrate fossil.

The Southwest Educational Development Library provides this lesson plan on dinosaurs for elementary grades. It includes math, science, and language arts objectives, as well as vocabulary and a concept web.

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