prehistoric-animal-museum

Prehistoric Animal Museum is a free, open-source 3D museum designed for curious children and the grown-ups who sit beside them. It presents prehistoric animal exhibits in English or Simplified Chinese, with short narration and a parent guide for the questions that follow. The project is free to visit, requires no account, and includes no ads or analytics scripts. The motivation is described personally: when the author's daughter was three, dinosaur television made her uneasy because stories centred on chases, fights, and defeating the dinosaur. The museum instead offers a place with no winning or losing and no frightening scenes. A child can choose an animal, turn it around, and listen to a short introduction, while a grown-up can add a thought or ask a question. Interaction and accessibility features include dragging with a finger or mouse to rotate a model, pinch or scroll to zoom, short English and Mandarin narration that never auto-plays, and a responsive layout for phone, tablet, and desktop. It supports keyboard navigation and respects reduced-motion settings. The museum follows the device language on a first visit, allows switching between English and Simplified Chinese at any time, remembers the choice, and provides a shareable link per language. It is aimed mainly at children aged 2-6 with a grown-up nearby. Exhibits span land, sky, and sea. Land animals include Stegosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Apatosaurus, Gigantoraptor, Woolly mammoth, Maiasaura, Sauropelta, Dilophosaurus, Spinosaurus, Lystrosaurus, Baryonyx, and Carnotaurus. Sky animals include Pteranodon, Rhamphorhynchus, Tupandactylus, Meganeura, and Archaeopteryx. Sea animals include Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, Megalodon, Mosasaurus, and Anomalocaris. The ichthyosaur and plesiosaur exhibits represent broader groups rather than one exact species, and colours, soft tissue, and some movement are described as evidence-informed artistic reconstructions. Privacy is addressed explicitly: there is no sign-in or user profile, and no names or contact details are requested. In a "Compare with me" feature, a parent may optionally choose boy or girl and enter an approximate height solely to set the current page's 3D character scale and viewpoint; these choices are not placed in the URL, uploaded, or sent to analytics, and disappear when the page closes. The experience makes no runtime calls to AI, advertising, or analytics services; models, images, and narration are prepared static assets. For local development, Node.js 20.19 or newer is required, with npm ci and npm run dev as the basic commands. Project checks include lint, typecheck, unit tests, build, and end-to-end tests. Contributions are guided by an animal authoring guide and a contributing document. The repository defines several legal layers: software code uses GNU AGPL-3.0-only; original museum writing, narration, exhibit backgrounds, and similar content use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; third-party libraries, fonts, 3D models, and mixed assets retain their own recorded terms; and project names, logos, and source-identifying brand elements are reserved, while renamed and rebranded forks remain welcome within the applicable licences. GitHub is the primary repository, with AtomGit as an official mirror for visitors in Mainland China.