An iPhone app about the ground beneath you
Bajocapa
Dig under your city.
Choose a city and see it in cross-section: rooftops above, eight bands of earth below. Rub the soil away with a fingertip and the creatures turn up that paleontologists really recorded around that place — then put any of them on a street, at full size, next to a city bus.
Coming soon to the App Store Free. No ads, no purchases, no account. iPhone, iOS 17 or later.For anyone who has wondered what is under the pavement
Most fossil apps hand you a catalogue of every dinosaur on Earth. Bajocapa goes the other way: it starts from one place you care about and only shows what was dug up near it. Under most cities that turns out to be Ice Age giants and old sea life rather than dinosaurs, and that honesty is the point. It is made for curious adults and teenagers, with no quizzes and no cartoon faces.
What you actually do
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Start from a real city
Choose from a built-in list of cities in Spain, Türkiye, Venezuela, the USA and Argentina. The app never asks where you are.
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Eight layers of time
Rub the soil off with one finger. Three finds crack a layer open and an older one waits below, from the Ice Age down to ancient seas.
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Only what was really found
Every layer is assembled from fossil records published in the Paleobiology Database around the chosen city. Two cities, two different digs.
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A shelf of your finds
Tap a glowing silhouette to lift it out. The collection sorts finds by city and layer and leaves shadows for what is still buried.
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Life-size on a street
Stand a find next to a hand, a cat, a person, a front door, a car, a football goal or a city bus, in metres or feet.
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18 cities with no signal needed
Madrid, İstanbul, Caracas, New York City, Buenos Aires and 13 more are built into the app. Any other city downloads once and then stays on your phone.
A dig, seen from the side
The main screen is a slice through the ground: a strip of sky and skyline, then layer after layer, getting darker and older as you go down. A depth ruler on the right counts the years and lets you jump back to any layer you have already opened.
The picture next to this text is a drawing of that screen, made for this page. Store screenshots will appear here once the App Store listing is live.
Your progress stays on your phone
- No account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Cleared soil and finds are saved only on the device.
- When a city is not built in, the app asks the Paleobiology Database for records inside a box around that city — never your location.
- At launch the app checks with our server whether an update is required. Notifications are optional and asked for once; the help desk sends a message only when you press Send.