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
Fossils are comparatively rare since they need super specific conditions in order to form – you need to die near a body of water, not be carried off or otherwise mauled too badly by scavengers, get covered in the right kind of sediments and water, and then your body of water needs to dry up and the rocks where you fossilized need to erode enough for your fossil or someone else’s nearby to be discovered. The chances are like crazy small.
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