Paleontologist

How to unlock Paleontologist in Cheevos, find the Chrome dinosaur game at chrome://dino or while offline. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You found the dinosaur. He was waiting the whole time.

He lives in a strange place: the gap where the internet is supposed to be and is not. Lose your connection, or navigate straight to his address, and there he is: a small pixelated dinosaur, standing on a flat gray line, ready to run.

Cache finds this extremely poetic. An offline dinosaur, surviving in the exact space between connections, doing the one thing he has always done, whether or not anyone is watching. Cache has a copy of the game preserved in the Stash, labeled THE PRE-INTERNET GUARDIAN, dated back to 2014 when it first appeared. The dinosaur looked the same then as he does now. Some things do not need to change.

Most people meet him only by accident, in the frustrating moment their WiFi drops. You went looking for him on purpose, which Cache thinks is the more honest way to meet him.

The catalog entry

CHROME DINO GAME Acquired: Visited the Chrome dinosaur game at chrome://dino. Condition: Offline. Or pretending to be. Rarity: Common. A classic discovery. Cache's Notes: The dinosaur lives in the space where the internet used to be. Cache finds this extremely poetic. An offline dinosaur, surviving in the gap between connections. He has a copy of the dinosaur game in the Stash labeled THE PRE-INTERNET GUARDIAN. It is from 2014. The dinosaur looked the same then.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

You can find him two different ways.

  1. Open a new tab in Chrome and type chrome://dino into the address bar, then press Enter.
  2. Alternatively, disconnect from the internet and try to load any webpage; Chrome will show its "No internet" page with the same dinosaur on it.
  3. Press the Space bar or Up arrow to make him jump and start the game.

Chrome's dinosaur, unofficially called the T-Rex Runner, first appeared in Chrome 39 back in 2014 as an Easter egg on the standard offline error page. It was designed by a small team on Chrome's UX staff as a way to make a frustrating moment, losing your connection, a little more bearable. The game itself is a simple endless runner: the dinosaur automatically moves forward, obstacles like cacti and pterodactyls appear, and the goal is to jump or duck at the right moment while the speed gradually increases.

Where it fits in the Stash

THE PRE-INTERNET GUARDIAN sits in the Chrome section of the Stash, right next to Cache's other records of the browser he has complicated feelings about. For the story of the raccoon cataloguing all of it, read the story.