The movement is incredibly slow/jank - the pickaxe should not force you in an unskippable animation that follows through/enacts whenever you hold down those buttons (maybe let the player move while doing it?)
When it comes down to it, there needs to be more depth/interest in these minigames - if you feel that they can have an "auto complete" system (as in the assembly function for the fossils), that means that the system/function likely isn't interesting enough to participate with on its most basic level (it could still be a feature added later on if you don't want to fix/achieve things).
I see some potential if you explore the players intentionally messing up their fossils to make new abominations - falsifying descriptions, or anything else (if that is fleshed out/expanded upon more, I feel that it could become a whole "good" vs "bad" player thing).
There are a lot of ways this game could expand in, as I feel it is somewhat flavorless in all of them (but especially the exploration part - why not add some combat or some other bs in the caves?)
My gripe is that everything here is effectively one giant fetch quest (as most games go), that the player can immediately recognize is a fetch quest. There needs to be depth/detail to the story to distract the player from that.