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Fossil Coloring Pages: 30 Detailed Studies of Trilobites, Ammonites, Amber, Tracks and Petrified Wood
Real kinds of fossils drawn up close on their slabs of rock, from a trilobite in shale to a mammoth molar, plus tracks, burrows and a fossil being cleaned at a workbench. Each line drawing is followed by a color reference page, and a notes file gives one plain fact about every design.
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These fossil coloring pages draw each find the way you’d see it on a museum table: up close, on its own chunk of rock, often with a brush, a hand lens, a notebook or a scale bar lying nearby. The lines are fine and the rock is full of cracks, grains and layers, so a single page takes a while.
The 30 designs
| Designs | What’s on them |
|---|---|
| 01–10 | Sea life: a trilobite in shale, a coiled ammonite, a straight chambered shell, a snail-like gastropod, a brachiopod shell bed, a bivalve with its mold, a horn coral, a colonial coral slab, a crinoid crown and stem, and a sea urchin |
| 11–16 | Plants: a fern impression, ginkgo leaves, a horsetail stem, a conifer cone, a log of petrified wood in a desert, and a leaf pressed into rock |
| 17–21 | Bones and teeth: a fish skeleton in shale, shark teeth, a turtle shell, a dinosaur limb bone and a mammoth molar |
| 22 | An ammonite mold and its cast side by side |
| 23–26 | Traces: three-toed footprints across a rock surface, burrows seen in a cut block, a coprolite and wavy feeding trails |
| 27–30 | An insect in amber, a fish being buried under lake sediment, a preparator cleaning an ammonite under a lamp, and two people photographing and recording a shell in a cliff |
Only design 20 is a dinosaur bone, so this isn’t a dinosaur book. Most of the set is shells, corals and plants.
Words on the pages
Each page has the design’s name and the line “Simplified illustration; not to scale” under the picture. Design 22 is the only one with diagram labels, two small side profiles marked negative mold and positive cast. DESIGN-NOTES.txt adds one sentence per design, for example that trilobites have a central lobe with a lobe on each side, or that a mold is an impression and a cast fills that space.
Coloring from the reference
The color pages lean on sandstone tans, rust and slate gray, with the ammonite in warm brown and the amber a glowing orange. Because every drawing sits right before its color page, you can keep the book in order and print both, or print only the odd pages and look at the colors on screen. Print at Actual Size in landscape.
Questions
- How do I print just the drawings?
- Print the odd-numbered pages. Each drawing is followed by its color reference, and the page numbers run 1 to 60 across the two PDFs, so the designs 16–30 file begins at page 31.
- Are the colors and names scientifically exact?
- No. DESIGN-NOTES.txt says the colors are artistic suggestions rather than the colors the living things had, and the names are broad groups such as horn coral or gastropod, not species identifications. It also notes that two fossils shown in the same set didn't necessarily live at the same time.
