Eli5 how come we have so many fossils of specific animals?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.