Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Nothronychus the very unusual Theropod Dinosaur coloring page

 This is a free coloring pages blog. 

Today's new drawing is of a very unusual dinosaur called Notheronychus.



Nothronychus the very unusual Theropod Dinosaur 


Nothronychus was a type of Therozinosaur.  It was very unusual in that it was a Theropod but ate plants.  The majority of Theropods ate meat or were carnivores.  But the Therozinosaurs all ate plants so they were herbivores.  

Nothronychus was a type of Therozinosaur first discovered in Western New Mexico on the Arizona border and then another species was discovered soon afterward in Southern Utah.  The Utah species was discovered where you mostly find marine reptiles.  It was within Utah's Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.  It appears that the Nothronychus graffami must have been washed out to sea and fossilized in the seafloor sediment.   

The New Mexico species is called Nothronychus mckinleyi.  The two finds were definitely the same genus but they had enough differences to be the same species.  They were found around 200 miles apart and appeared to have lived between 1 million and 3 million years apart in the Cretaceous Period.  Both species were around 14 feet long or about 4 meters long.  They both weighed around 1800 lbs or about 800 kg.  

These dinosaurs looked like a partially plucked giant turkey.  They had a potbelly and had huge claws on very big arms.  Those claws were probably for defense.  Nothronychus had claws that were around 12 inches or 30 cm long.  The claws were backed up by very large arms.  It had small peg-like herbivore teeth, but its arms were probably very effective defensive weapons.  

There were also some Pterosaur fossilized bones that were found in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument so there are Pterosaurs in this drawing.  

NOTE:  This drawing, in printable form, can be found by clicking on the button labeled Paleontology and then scrolling down to the bottom of the Mesozoic section of the page.  Then click on the title of the drawing and you will have a printable page to color.  Have fun coloring!


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