Field Log 001: Building a Real-Fossil App from Chile

RODRIGO · 28 June 2026 · 5 min read

I'm Rodrigo — a solo developer in Santiago who got tired of looking for a paleontology app that respected the science. So I started building one.

Hi. I'm Rodrigo, I live in Santiago, Chile, and for about the last six months I've been building PaleoDex on nights and weekends. This is the first entry in what I want to be an honest log of that process — what I'm making, why, and what's been hard. Let's start at the beginning.

A kid with every dinosaur book

I've been into paleontology since I was small. As a kid I did a paleontology course with Grinpach here in Chile, I had every dinosaur book I could get my hands on, and the first Walking with the Dinosaurs absolutely melted my brain. That never really went away. Over the years I kept coming back — reading, watching, following the field from a distance, the way a lot of us never quite grow out of it.

The app that didn't exist

A while ago I visited the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural here in Santiago, and walking out I had this simple itch: I wanted an app I could just whip out — to look something up, learn something new, or just poke at the prehistoric world for a few minutes. So I went looking for it. What I found was either dense and academic, or a flashy game full of invented creatures. Nothing that was both real and genuinely fun to use. So I decided to build the thing I'd been trying to find.

Who's actually building this

Full transparency: it's one person. By day I've worked in IT support for six years; everything I know about building apps and websites is self-taught and sharpened on the job. PaleoDex is built with React Native and Expo. I'm not a paleontologist — I'm an enthusiast who can code, standing on the shoulders of the people who actually do the science.

The best part: the data is already out there

Here's the thing that genuinely amazes me. The information exists. Researchers, museums and open-science projects around the world have spent decades documenting life on this planet — and, incredibly, a lot of it is open. The Paleobiology Database, GBIF, the Open Tree of Life and others let anyone build on top of real science. That generosity is the entire foundation of PaleoDex. The information is out there; it just needs a friendly way to be presented.

The hard parts

Two things have been the real fights. The first is data normalization. Combining different databases — each with its own structure, names, gaps and quirks — into one clean, consistent catalogue can be a nightmare. It's unglamorous, finicky work, and it's most of the job. The second is FossilRun, the dig mini-game. Making something that feels good to play, runs smoothly, and still only ever surfaces real, photographed species is its own kind of hard. Both are worth it.

Why I won't let it invent things

This is the part I care about most. Right now it's trivially easy to spin up a dinosaur app with AI — type a prompt, let it generate some "facts," slap on AI images of what a fossil might have looked like, ship it. And a lot of what comes out cares nothing about whether it's accurate. That genuinely bothers me. Because if the goal is to learn, an AI summary of possibly-fake data, illustrated with a made-up picture, is worse than nothing — it teaches you something untrue, with total confidence.

To actually learn, we need the sources. We need the research. We need the work. So PaleoDex doesn't invent. Every creature is a real, documented genus, the text is sourced, and if a fact isn't there, we leave it blank instead of guessing. It's harder that way. That's the entire point.

What this log is

That's the spirit of this Dev Log: an honest record of building PaleoDex in the open — the wins, the unglamorous data-wrangling, the things I get wrong and fix. If you want to follow along — or you're near Santiago and want to read about the Ice Age giants under your feet — join the waitlist. More soon.

— Rodrigo · Santiago, Chile

Mentioned

A few things mentioned in this post:

• Grinpach (paleontology outreach, Chile)
• Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Santiago
• Where PaleoDex's data comes from