Paper Plate Pliosaur

After a wonderfully busy family workshop at Lyme Regis Museum where we built a full-size Pliosaur skull, I decided to put a simple idea here for children to try at home, don’t worry, it’s smaller and more manageable!

This ‘Paper Plate Pliosaur skull’ only has a few stages and all you need is one paper plate, a pencil, a pair of scissors, and some tape or glue to hold things together.

‘Paper Plate Pliosaur’ instructions

This is easy to adapt for younger children too, for example, instead of cutting out the tricky ‘rows of teeth’ you could just cut out individual ones, and maybe glue them on one side at a time, allowing time for them to dry in between.

If you wanted to extend the idea you could even try making other parts of the skeleton. If you found some nice reference images online, you could make other bones, the spine, ribs, and paddle bones. Here’s a similar model, this time of an Ichthyosaur, where I’ve used the same technique for the skull, and then added the other bones just using scrap cardboard and paper straws.

. . . and here below you can see a much more complicated version of an Ichthyosaur skeleton which I made for an exhibition. It’s still made in the same way, mostly cardboard, some paper straws, and also using scrap cardboard tubes for the vertebrae. This has been covered with a layer of tissue paper and then painted.