Sudoku Made and maintained by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton.
Brian builds the playable puzzle tools, while Karan helps test clarity, difficulty feel, and the player experience.
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How many dinosaurs are in Dinosaur Sudoku?
Dinosaur Sudoku puts nine prehistoric pictures where a classic sudoku has its digits, each once in every row, column and box. This page stays at the dig site; for the three views and what the levels ask of you, which all 21 of our picture games have in common, see Themed Sudoku.
Two of the nine are dinosaurs, the 🦖 T-Rex and the 🦕 Sauropod: the only two in the emoji set, unless you count birds. Palaeontologists do. Birds descend from the theropods, the meat-eating branch T. rex belongs to, so strictly every bird emoji is a dinosaur too. Nine look-alike reptiles would make a poor puzzle anyway, so the other seven set the scene.
Your resident expert will ask which sauropod it is. Unicode does not say; it names the emoji only SAUROPOD, the long-necked plant-eaters that include Diplodocus and Brontosaurus, a name sunk into Apatosaurus in 1903 and restored by a 2015 study.
Are the egg, the bone and the footprint from dinosaurs?
| Picture | Number | First on | Unicode’s name |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🦖 T-Rex | 1 | 4×4 | T-REX |
| 🦕 Sauropod | 2 | 4×4 | SAUROPOD |
| 🥚 Egg | 3 | 4×4 | EGG |
| 🦴 Fossil | 4 | 4×4 | BONE |
| 🌋 Volcano | 5 | 6×6 | VOLCANO |
| 🐾 Footprint | 6 | 6×6 | PAW PRINTS |
| 🌿 Fern | 7 | 9×9 | HERB |
| ☄️ Meteor | 8 | 9×9 | COMET |
| 🐦 Bird | 9 | 9×9 | BIRD |
Names, numbers and order follow the game’s key; the last column is the emoji’s official Unicode name.
Only loosely. The 🥚 Egg is a plain egg, the picture Easter Sudoku deals, though every dinosaur we know of hatched from one. The 🦴 Fossil is Unicode’s BONE, a clean modern bone, and the 🐾 Footprint is PAW PRINTS, a cat’s or a dog’s; Dog Sudoku deals both. A tyrannosaur’s footprint shows three big toes, like a giant bird’s. And with no fern emoji to use, the 🌿 Fern is HERB.
When does the meteor appear?
Pictures join in the key’s order as the board grows. A 4×4 is the T-Rex, the sauropod, the egg and the fossil: the dinosaurs with no disaster attached. The volcano and the footprint arrive at 6×6, the size every game opens on, and the fern, the meteor and the bird wait for 9×9. The meteor is picture 8, and the only thing after it is a bird, which is how it went: the birds are the dinosaurs that lived through it.
The ☄️ tile is the emoji Unicode calls COMET, the one Space Sudoku deals as its Comet; Windows draws it as a red ball with a streaming tail. A true METEOR emoji came with Emoji 18.0 in September 2026, too new for most devices to draw yet. What wiped out the dinosaurs, bar the birds, 66 million years ago was an asteroid about 10 kilometres across, striking at Chicxulub in Mexico; a 2024 study in Science traced it to a carbon-rich asteroid from beyond Jupiter, not a comet. India’s Deccan Traps volcanoes were erupting too, and how much they added is still argued over.
On 9×9, look twice at the two dinosaurs, at least as Windows draws them, light or dark: both are the same teal green, the T-Rex standing on two legs, the sauropod on four. The Fossil is the pale one, a bone that on the light board fades into the tint of the squares you were dealt; on the dark board the faint one is the dark purple Footprint. The red Bird stands out on both. Both adds each picture’s number (T-Rex 1, Sauropod 2) in a small badge in the corner of the square.
How do you play with a child who knows more dinosaurs than you?
Dinosaur-mad children often know more about the theme than the adult beside them, so use it. Hand the expert the scanning job: which pictures this row already has, which box still needs its egg, where the T-Rex can still go. Tap a square holding a picture and every copy of it lights up. Being the authority keeps a young solver in the chair far longer than being taught, and every one of those questions is real sudoku.
Those scanning jobs are the two moves every small board needs. “What does this row already have?” leads to a naked single, where a square’s row, column and box show every picture but one. “Where can the T-Rex still go?” leads to a hidden single, the one square in a box left for it. Sudoku for Kids goes further into teaching both, and a child ready to drop the pictures will find the same sizes in digits at 4x4 Sudoku and 6x6 Sudoku.
What do you do when a Hard 9×9 gets stuck?
9×9 Hard is where the expert graduates. Those boards are dug so that singles plus one more move, locked candidates, finish them, and on some, singles run out first. The pair below is one, a real Hard deal from this game. The ringed Birds in the top-right box are the way on.
That move is pointing: when a picture’s places in a box all lie in one row or column, they clear the rest of that line. It is one half of locked candidates; box-line reduction, the other half, runs from a line into a box. And it ends on a bone: take the Bird out of R3C1 and the Fossil is all that is left.
Auto Notes fills each open square with every picture its row, column and box allow, as pencil marks, and stops there: at the point the first board shows, it would still list the Bird in R3C1. Take it out yourself: turn on Notes, select the square, tap the Bird. Hint will not find the move either; it fills a random square with its answer.
After the dig: what to play next?
Animal Sudoku swaps the fossils for living animals, and by the palaeontologists’ rule its penguin is the one dinosaur in it. The comet flies on in Space Sudoku among rockets and planets, and Emoji Sudoku keeps one set of nine pictures all year round.