Matching Game: Dinosaurs

Flip two cards at a time and match each dinosaur to its name. Every card says whether it is a Dinosaur or a Name, and a pair is always one of each. The game counts a mistake when you miss a match on a card you have already seen.

How to remember the names#

Most dinosaur names are built from Greek or Latin words, and many of them describe the animal. Triceratops means “three-horned face” and Stegosaurus means “roof lizard”, after the plates on its back. Look for the one thing each picture shows, such as a crest, a frill or a row of plates, and link it to the sound of the name with a mental image. See how to create mnemonic images for more ways to build them.

To remember where each card is, give every position on the board a place in a memory palace, and walk back through the palace when you need to find a partner.

About the pictures#

The cards show historic paintings, made between 1897 and 1931. Most are by Charles R. Knight, who painted prehistoric animals for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago. The Iguanodon and the Archaeopteryx are by Heinrich Harder, who painted a set of collector cards of prehistoric animals in Germany, and the Ceratosaurus is by Joseph Smit, from a book of prehistoric animals published in London in 1910. A few are sketches, or survive only as black and white prints.

The paintings show what scientists thought these animals looked like at the time, and some of those ideas have since been revised. Tyrannosaurus, Iguanodon, Edmontosaurus and Ceratosaurus are painted standing upright with their tails on the ground, where they are now thought to have held the back roughly level and the tail out behind. Knight’s Stegosaurus has more spikes on its tail than the four the fossils show. The eggs beside the Protoceratops were later found to belong to a different dinosaur. Knight painted Ornitholestes with bare skin, where it probably had a coat of simple feathers. The colours are a guess, as they are in nearly every dinosaur picture, because fossils almost never keep them.

Every animal in the deck is a dinosaur, Archaeopteryx included: it looks like a bird, and all birds are dinosaurs. Pteranodon (a flying reptile), Plesiosaurus and Mosasaurus (sea reptiles) and Dimetrodon (which lived before the dinosaurs) are often shown with them, but none of them is a dinosaur, so they are left out.

Board sizes#

The deck has fourteen dinosaurs, and every board deals a different set of them each game: six on the smallest board, eight on the next and ten on the 5 × 4 board. Start small, and move up a size once you can clear a board with only a few mistakes.

Try another matching game or see all of our free memory games.