Every Creature in PaleoDex Really Existed

PALEODEX · 28 June 2026 · 5 min read

A lot of dinosaur apps are games first — full of invented hybrids and stylized monsters. PaleoDex took the opposite bet.

Open a popular dinosaur app and you can splice two species into a glowing hybrid, or meet a cartoon raptor that never existed. That isn't a bug — those apps are games, and they'll happily tell you so. PaleoDex made the opposite bet: every creature in it actually lived.

Two kinds of dinosaur app

Most dinosaur apps fall into one of two camps. The first is entertainment-first: blockbuster titles like Jurassic World Alive and Jurassic World: The Game let you collect DNA and build fictional hybrids in a lab — their own taglines are "science knows no limits" and "defy the laws of science." Survival games like ARK aren't aiming for accuracy either. None of that is wrong; it's just not real.

The second camp is reference-first — it tries to show you the actual animals. There's far less of it, and most of it isn't a game. PaleoDex is trying to be both: a real reference wrapped in a real game.

What "real data" actually means here

Every genus in PaleoDex is a real, documented taxon pulled from open scientific databases — the Paleobiology Database, GBIF, the Open Tree of Life, and others. The classification in each dossier is the live scientific lineage from the Open Tree of Life. The write-ups are cleaned, sourced extracts from Wikipedia — not text an AI invented. Whether a genus is extinct or still living is flagged using GBIF. Nothing in the catalogue is a designer's creation. You can see exactly where it all comes from on our About the Data page, and browse it in the Fossil Library.

The hard part: leaving the blank blank

Here's the rule we don't break: if a fact isn't sourced, we leave it blank. That sounds obvious, but it's the opposite of how a lot of apps — and a lot of the modern web — work, where gaps get filled with a guess, a generic line, or AI-generated filler. We'd rather show you nothing than show you something we can't stand behind. An empty field is a feature: it means everything you do see is real. (That's also why no AI-written species summaries ship in the app — they were deliberately left out.)

Why a small studio would bother

Because the realness is the whole point. PaleoDex is for people who want the actual fossil record — kids who'll grow into it, students, teachers, museum-goers — not a cartoon of it. Real and fun were never opposites: you can dig, collect, chase rarities and climb a leaderboard, and still have everything you find be a genuine, sourced species.

Check our work

The receipts are public. Every dossier links back to where its data came from, and the About the Data page lists every source we use. Browse the Fossil Library, travel the Continental Drift map, and hold us to it. If a fact isn't sourced, you'll know — because it won't be there.

Sources

We name other apps only to describe the genre fairly — they're games and don't claim to be accurate. PaleoDex's own sourcing is listed in full on the About the Data page.

• Jurassic World Alive — official app listing (hybrids)
• Jurassic World: The Game — official listing ("defy the laws of science")
• PaleoDex — About the Data (our sources)