Dinosaur to draw
Draw a random dinosaur with its period and diet - filter by Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous.
Runs locally in your browser. Nothing you generate is ever sent to a server.
Press "Generate Dinosaur" to see a result here.
Period or group
Press Generate and a dinosaur comes up with the period it lived in and what it ate. The list covers all three periods of the Mesozoic, plus the flying and swimming reptiles that shared the world with them.
This is the single most common misconception about the subject, so they are grouped separately here rather than being quietly mixed in. Pterodactyls flew and plesiosaurs swam, but neither belongs to the dinosaur group - they were separate lines of reptile living at the same time. Mentioning this once usually fixes it permanently, which is why the filter names them for what they are.
The Triassic has the earliest and generally smallest dinosaurs, the Jurassic has the enormous long-necked sauropods and the plated Stegosaurus, and the Cretaceous has most of the famous ones including Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. Filtering by period is what makes this useful for a lesson on one slice of the Mesozoic rather than all of it at once.
Details here follow the mainstream view, but palaeontology revises itself regularly. Spinosaurus has been reconstructed several different ways within living memory, and the debate about whether it swam is not settled. That uncertainty is worth telling children about rather than hiding - it is how science actually works.
The list is filtered to the group you chose, then one is drawn using your browser's cryptographic random source with rejection sampling, so nothing is favoured. Batches without repeats use a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by the same source.
Press Generate and one comes up with the period it lived in and what it ate.
Yes. The filter covers the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, plus flying and marine reptiles.
No, and that is why they are in separate groups here. Pterosaurs flew and plesiosaurs swam, but neither belongs to the dinosaur group - they were reptiles living alongside them.
Yes. Set the quantity and press once, then Copy All to take the list with periods and diets included.
The periods and diets follow the mainstream scientific consensus. Palaeontology moves, so some details are revised over time - Spinosaurus in particular has been reinterpreted more than once.
Yes. Each dinosaur is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random source, so every one in the chosen group has an equal chance.