I’ve heard that 99% of animals won’t fossilize and the ones that do are rare to even find, if that’s the case then how come we have so many examples of specific species even across the world from eachother when surely the fossil record should just be a jumbled mess of at least only quasi related species, is it that some species are lumped together due to similarities or what?
In: Biology
It really has to do with the animals and location in most cases. For example, dinosaurs fossilize comparatively well because they were usually big. That being said, you’re correct that it’s very rare that things fossilized at all, and that the fossil record is a jumbled, quasi-related mess. When you consider all the animals that have existed, what seems like so many really does only represent a tiny fraction of prehistoric biodiversity.
I don’t exactly know what you mean by species across the world from each other though, could you elaborate?
Because we don’t. Almost all fossils you see in museums are replicas made from casts of fossils. The actual fossils are so rare and valuable that they’re kept locked away.
For instance, only about 30 T-Rex fossils have ever been found and they were around for about 2 million years. One estimate is that about 2.5 billion T-Rexes ever lived. So we’ve found 1 T-Rex fossil for about every 80,000,000 T-Rexes who ever lived.
edit:
Funnily enough scientists are glad it’s this way. It makes it easier for science to study different species if we only have a few examples of each. It fits them in species boxes a lot easier.
Edit 2:
For something a bit closer to us we have about 300 Neanderthal fossils. Still not a lot.
The fossil record is a mess. But the number of fossils we have of a particular animal depend on how abundant that animal was and whether its habit was near clay soil, tar, or water/ocean. An animal that dies and quickly gets covered in clay will have a better probability of fossilizing. Ocean critters like sea shells are also abundant. Getting buried and fossilized in the ocean is easy.
Some animals we only have one of their species on record.
So there’s about 4,000 mostly..ish full skeletons of dinosaurs out there.
Dinos were on earth for 165 *million* years.
So that’s about one full fossil every 40,000 years that dinos existed.
Modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years.
So that would be like finding 5 human fossils. Total ove the entire time humans have been around.
Yeah, we have found a lot of fossils. But there were 100s of billions of not trillions of dinosaurs out there.
It *is* a jumbled mess. We have identified some 700 species of dinosaurs. There we’re likely millions of them.
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