hackclub/dinosaurs is an image repository with a naming convention, and the README is the catalogue

One file per drawing, named after its author

The repository is a flat collection of image files. There is no source code, the primary language is recorded as unknown, and the top level entries are images with names like `Artist_MOBAI_dino.png`, `MohitTiwariBytes_dino_mohit_absolute_cinema.png` and `FireEntity1__3.png`.

The naming convention is the only structure the repository has, and it is a good one. The convention is a prefix carrying the artist's handle, an underscore, then a short slug describing the drawing, then the extension. The README index follows the same convention, quoting the artist's own caption above each image.

That choice does several useful things at once. It makes authorship recoverable from the filename without a metadata file, it makes the collection searchable by artist, and it means a duplicate filename collision between two contributors is close to impossible because the handle is part of the name. The occasional deviation exists, such as `jspaint-dino.png` and `dino-plant.png`, which use descriptive names without a handle, and the collection includes a file with a space in it and another with an apostrophe, so the convention is strong but not enforced by a linter.

The formats are mixed, with `.png` dominating, and `.jpg` appearing alongside it, plus a `.gif` for a waving dinosaur. A naming detail worth noting is that the URL encoding matters: one entry is `confused%20dino.jpg` with the space escaped, and one reference uses angle brackets around `Ancient Orpheus.png`, which is a Markdown path with spaces in it.

The mascot has a story, and the story explains the art

Prophet Orpheus is Hack Club's mascot, who takes the form of a nondescript dinosaur. The README describes her as always getting into crazy adventures, from stealing food to going to the moon.

The origin is credited to nathanielthealligator, whose Tumblr is given as the creator. The README also states that she is usually drawn in black and white in limited drawing programs like MS Paint or Pinta.

That last constraint is the single most useful thing in the documentation for anyone who wants to contribute. It is not a stylistic preference, it is a technical limitation, and it explains the visual consistency of the collection better than any style guide could. Black and white in a basic raster editor is a constraint that produces a recognisable look, and the presence of `jspaint-dino.png` and the `MS Paint`-adjacent entries shows people really did work in those tools rather than in a vector package.

The mascot also carries a character description that reads as backstory, in the form of a short poem titled Prophet Orpheus, The Dinosaur Who Can Never Look Back. The reason given is that looking back would mean acknowledging her past and accepting the fate of the dinosaurs. The right now, she is still able to exist through the engagement of modern constructions like reading books and chasing after money, only ever living in the present, engaging with the idea that she is still alive. The comparison is drawn to her Greek namesake, who could not give up on the idea that his wife was dead until he was finally forced to look back. It is signed with a citation to nathanielthealligator.

That backstory is not decoration. It is the reason the collection can hold a dinosaur at the arcade, a dinosaur teaching, a dinosaur sealing letters with wax and a dinosaur trying to contribute to open source but unable to because its arms are too short. The mascot gives contributors a character to put in a situation, and the situations are what make the drawings varied.

The tooling around the collection is where the real workflow lives

The repository points outward to the tools that actually make the collection work, and those links matter more than the image files.

There is a Draw your own dino link to hack.af/make-dino, which is the submission path, and the project homepage is hack.af/draw-dino. The repository description points to rawr.hackclub.com, where the drawings can be seen, and there is a link to the story of Orpheus at hackclub.com/workshops/orpheus.

The separation is sensible and worth understanding. The repository is the durable record, the workshop page is the narrative, rawr is the gallery, and the short link is the entry point for contributing. A contributor who submits through the tool and then lands a file in the repository is doing two different things: participating in the workshop experience and adding to the permanent collection.

For an engineer, the interesting technical detail is that the short link system means a submission can be a URL to an image rather than a file added to a Git repository, which lowers the barrier enough that the collection includes pixel art, a money-failure sequence and other styles without any difference in how they arrive. The other end of that bargain is that the repository's index is a human-edited file, so it can and does drift from what is actually present.

The last push to the repository was on 2026-10-13 and it is not archived, so contributions continue, but there is only one release tag, v0.0.1 from 2023-08-07, which tells you the versioning has never been part of this project's model.

The README index has drifted from the files, and that is informative

The README is the catalogue, and reading it closely shows the seams of a hand-maintained index.

Several captions have no image beneath them, or the image reference points at a file that was clearly submitted for a different caption. The entry captioned SaifAbdelrazek011_Mystery_Dracula_Dino reuses the image file for DefinetlyNotAI_dino, so the Dracula entry renders the wrong picture. The entry for DomathID_dino is followed by a stray line containing only the letter c, and then no image at all before the next caption. The entry captioned a dinosaur trying, but failing to get money shows two images, money_dinosaur_1 and money_dinosaur_2, so that submission is a sequence rather than a single file.

None of that is a defect in the drawings. It is a defect in the index, and it is the predictable outcome of a README that grows by hand as people contribute. It also means the README cannot be treated as an accurate manifest of the collection, which is the main practical caveat for anyone planning to consume this repository as a source of assets.

The set of captions is the other interesting read. They cluster into recognizable scenarios: emotional states such as confused, hesitating, angry, crying, laughing, nervous and tired; situations such as at the arcade, dino teaching, dino from the office, dino waving hello, dinosaur doing code stuff, a smart dinosaur reading docs, and a dinosaur handing docs; and parodies, including a rad skater girl dinosaur, a teenage mutant ninja turtle dinosaur, a mystery Dracula dinosaur, a pirate dinosaur, a Joker dinosaur, a reddit dinosaur, an 8-bit dinosaur, a purple dinosaur and a dragon with a mask.

The professional looking ones sit alongside the joke ones without a hierarchy in the index, and several entries are explicitly about programming and about money, which is the mascot being used for what the community actually talks about.

MIT licensing is simple, but the artworks carry their own authorship

The repository is MIT licensed, which is the permissive grant with minimal obligations and the standard choice for a collection like this.

There is a wrinkle specific to a community art project that the licence does not address, and it is worth stating for anyone who wants to reuse a specific drawing. A collective MIT grant over the repository asserts that the licensor can license the contributions, and for a community collection with a defined submission flow that is a reasonable position. But each individual artist retains copyright in their own work in the ordinary way, and the collection's provenance is only as good as the process that recorded it.

The names in the filenames and captions are the attribution trail, and they are the part most likely to be incomplete for older entries. If your use of a drawing is commercial or public facing, the safe path is to find the original submission and confirm terms, or to make your own drawing.

The rest of the repository structure supports the same idea. The top level is a flat directory of images with a `.gitignore` at the root, and the entry list shows files spanning many years and many naming styles, including a mix of handles with underscores, hyphens, and CamelCase variants. The `Dinos.jpg` cover image sits at the top, referenced as the cover photo at the start of the README.

For a project whose stated purpose is to collect drawings, the licence, the naming convention and the index are the whole of the engineering, and all three are documented. That is a fair outcome for a repository that exists to be looked at rather than to be depended on.

Editorial conclusion

Use hackclub/dinosaurs as a source of mascot artwork if you are building something for the Hack Club community, and follow its filename convention if you want your drawing to be found by the index. Do not treat it as a maintained asset library with a stable API, because the catalogue is a hand-maintained README and its release history stopped at a single v0.0.1 tag, so a consumer that needs a dependable feed should read the rawr site instead of scraping this repository. Verify first that the licence of any specific file is covered by the repository's MIT grant, that the file you want exists rather than only being referenced in the README, and that the drawing tool constraints match the style you are producing.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. hackclub/dinosaurs on GitHub
2. License: MIT
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases