Swim With Elasmosaurus

If only we could swim with Elasmosaurus (without getting bitten I should add). Elasmosaurus has been a popular creature since it was first made known to the public (even before the corrected reprint) and as such has garnered, over the past 145 years, many, many roles in the veins of popular "dinosaurs." Unfortunately, Elasmosaurus has been considered just that, a dinosaur, for many of those years and it has taken quite a long time for the general public to even hear the phrase "marine reptile" without automatically becoming lost in conversation when the term dinosaur is not applied. Considering even I grew up hearing the term dinosaur applied to aquatic reptiles of the Mesozoic, it is not much of a surprise, but I feel we should make all efforts to make sure that even though they, the children, are reading a page called KidsDigDinos they are reading about an ancient animal that is not a dinosaur. Additionally, there is a little factoid on that page stating the flippers may have helped in terrestrial locomotion; currently it is held to be highly doubtable that any of the Plesiosauria would have been on land for any reason (other than being beached). Enchanted Learning presents Elasmosaurus without this little factoid and is actually a little more complex in its information presentation, which is nice; having more than one level of information means I get to present a more challenging fact page for good readers. There are also toys and films/cartoons that have built up over the years from highly inaccurate portrayals to fairly scientifically correct portrayals (in light of current science).

Coloring pages for today are more than plentiful. I have found accurate and inaccurate images of Elasmosaurus. I am going to say that the most accurate image that could be used for coloring belongs to Josep Zacarias (ask him if you want to use it!). However, I am just going to post the rest of the images and everyone that wants to color can choose what they want to color: