Special Interest
FossilForge
Players run paleontology expeditions -- excavating fossil sites grid-by-grid, preparing specimens in the lab, classifying them taxonomically, and building museum exhibits. Real geological periods, scientifically accurate specimens, and the careful process of real fossil preparation. The only paleontology simulation on iOS for ages 9-14.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Amber
#FFA726 FossilForge makes you a paleontologist! Excavate fossil sites square by square, prepare your specimens in the lab, figure out what creatures they came from, and build museum exhibits that tell the story of life on Earth across 4.5 billion years.
Characters who teach
Meet the cast
Each character in FossilForge is one idea in the study of fossils: sorting life into families, deep time, how body shapes change, what ancient places were like, and mass extinctions, plus the missing pages of the record, look-alike creatures, footprints, how fossils form, and shared skeletons. Professor Petra frames each one.
Seam
Taxonomic + fossil-type classification — family-resemblance-matching (what KIND of organism?)
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Span
Deep-time + geological chronology — scale-of-scales (WHEN did this organism live?)
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Branch
Morphological adaptation + evolutionary change — branching-not-laddering
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Field
Paleoenvironment + ecosystem reconstruction — fossils-as-a-place-story
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Last
Mass extinctions + extinction-event reasoning — witness-and-choose (cross-app cameo with EcoSphere Brink)
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Blank
The incomplete record — the fossil record is a story with most of its pages missing
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Guise
Convergent evolution — unrelated creatures arriving at the same outward form
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Imprint
Trace fossils — fossils of behaviour not bodies: footprints, burrows, trails
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Seep
Fossilization — how a living thing rarely becomes a fossil: quick burial, slow mineral swap
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Underframe
Homology — the same underlying skeleton, in the same order, beneath different forms
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Excavation
Carefully dig through rock layers to uncover fossils. Different layers represent different time periods -- deeper means older! Use the right tools: a pickaxe fo
Specimen Lab
Bring your fossils to the lab. Clean off the rock, piece together broken fragments, and identify what creature left these bones. Compare your find to reference
Geological Timeline
Place your discoveries on Earth's 4.5-billion-year timeline. See how life changed from tiny bacteria to giant dinosaurs to modern mammals. Each fossil adds to t
Museum Builder
Design exhibits to display your best fossils. Arrange them by time period, species, or location. Your museum grows as your collection grows!
Mentored by Amber — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How FossilForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
FossilForge runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
FossilForge is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch
