About DinoVerse

🎯 Our mission

To teach accurate dinosaur science in a way an 8-year-old enjoys and a teacher trusts — at zero cost to anyone, on any device, even offline.

🔍 How we check facts

• Every animal page lists its sources: museums (Natural History Museum London, Smithsonian, AMNH), the Paleobiology Database, peer-reviewed papers, and Wikipedia articles with their own citations.
• Text is written in our own words, never copied.
• Where scientists disagree (for example on size or weight), we show a range, and Explorer mode explains the debate.
• Old ideas that turned out to be wrong appear only in “Myth vs fact” boxes.
• Spotted a mistake? Science changes all the time — we update pages as new fossils are found.

🎨 How our pictures are made

Our dinosaur illustrations and animations are drawn by a small art engine: each animal is described by a body plan, colours and features (horns, crests, plates…), and the engine draws it as an SVG. Colours are educated guesses — skin colour very rarely fossilises (Borealopelta is a famous exception!). Photos of real fossils come from Wikimedia Commons and are only used when their licence allows it.

🧊 How our 3D models are made

Most of our 3D models are shaped from a scientific life reconstruction painted by a paleoartist: the animal's outline is “inflated” into a rounded 3D body, and the painting itself is wrapped around it as the skin. Each model is sized to the animal's real length, so augmented reality shows it life-size. They look best from the side, like the paintings they come from, and they are teaching models, not scientific scans. Where no suitable painting exists, a simplified body-shape model is used instead. For real fossil scans, explore the Smithsonian 3D collection.

🔊 How our sounds are made

Nobody knows exactly what dinosaurs sounded like, because voice boxes don't fossilise. Our sounds are synthesised from scientific ideas: closed-mouth booming like crocodiles and some birds, trumpet-like resonance in hollow hadrosaur crests, and bird-like hisses and coos for small feathered dinosaurs. Bigger animals get deeper sounds. Every sound has a written transcript.

🛡️ Privacy

We collect no personal data. There are no accounts, adverts or cookies. We count visits anonymously with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and does not identify or follow anyone. Your quiz scores, badges, favourites and display settings are saved only in your own browser and never leave your device.

♿ Accessibility

Large text and buttons, keyboard support, visible focus, a dyslexia-friendly font option, light and dark themes, captions for every sound, text descriptions for 3D models, and animations that pause when your device asks for reduced motion.