An actual 6 year-old asked me the question today. I was at a loss.
**Edit**: a lot of interesting answers, food for thought, and ideas on how to explain it to a child. Many thanks to the community!
If I summarize:
* Dinosaurs lived for a very (very) long time, all over the earth, and there were countless different species of them.
* There were few of our ancestors, from just a few species, and most of their existence was confined to limited geographical areas.
* The conditions for a fossil to form are extremely rare, and they may have been even rarer for our ancestors than they were for dinosaurs.
In: 819
Put things into perspective, if history was an hour long, humans like us have existed for about 1 minute and 30 seconds.
Dinosaurs on the other hand lived on earth 40 minutes.
Now humans like us is very specific, it’s the same as counting all the Golden retrievers you see in a day, where as dinosaurs is very broad, it’s like counting all the animals you see in a day.
So if you had a minute and a half to find every golden retriever in your neighborhood you may see 2 or 3, but if you had 40 minutes to count every animal, bird, squirrel, cat, ant, fly, spider, chipmunk, you’d probably see hundreds!
If they follow that, you can get even more detailed by highlighting habitats. Golden retrievers in your neighborhood live in houses, but animals can live everywhere. Every tree has birds, every lawn has worms and ants, every flower has bees,.
Humans like us lived in really specific places, if your house is a metaphor of earth, humans like us spent a lot of time occupying what’s basically the bedroom closet, where as dinosaurs could live in the entire house.
That’s probably a good point to leave it at but you could also get into bigger pieces of things being easier to find after decay and erosion and such but that may be too grim.
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