A Handful of Good Resources for Learning About Dinosaurs

How Do We Know What Dinosaurs Looked Like? is a new video from the crew at Brain Stuff. The video provides a short overview of the clues that paleontologists look for when determining how a dinosaur may have looked when it was alive. The video is appropriate for students at or beyond the fourth grade level.

Watching How Do We Know What Dinosaurs Looked Like? prompted me to look up some of the other dinosaur resources that I’ve reviewed over the years. Here are some of the better ones that are still online.

The Natural History Museum hosts a directory of names, facts, and figures for more than 300 dinosaurs. One of the ways that you can search through the database is by country. Select the “in your country” option to find the dinosaurs that may have roamed the land in what is now your country. The search results will display a grid of drawings the types of dinosaurs in your country. Click on the images to learn more the dinosaurs.

The Canadian Museum of Nature hosts a good collection of online games and animations about mammals, birds, and dinosaurs. A few of the games and animations are Canada-specific, but those and all of the others have a broad appeal. In the fossils section of the site I viewed an animation through which I learned how horned dinosaurs ate their food.

The Walking With Dinosaurs apps (free iPad appfree Android app) use a bit of augmented reality to take students on a virtual walk with dinosaurs. To use the apps you have to print out the “targets” that when scanned reveal a dinosaur’s story. The apps also allow your students to include pictures of themselves in settings with the dinosaurs that they learn about through the app.

The following video from Untamed Science teaches us a bit about how dinosaur skeletons are reconstructed.

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